From The Outside In

A few months ago I was watching the man channel (ESPN) and I ended up catching an interview with a famous basketball player. He was giving an account of one of his most famous shots and it struck me as being really odd. I really don’t want to get into names because people will swear I’m hating… You know you can’t say anything about someone’s basketball hero without hearing about stat lines and amazing shots…(shaking…fighting it…struggling)..ok.. It was Magic Johnson. Magic Erving Johnson hall of fame NBA all-star and Olympic champion. He gets all his props (even though the game was ugly!). Well he was going over a last minute shot that he took over the Boston Celtics back in the 80’s. I don’t remember the exact quote but he said something like, “I faked to the right, then I faked to the left…I saw that the help defense was coming so I faked a pass. I glanced at the clock. Then I jab stepped to get some room, gave a couple head fakes, and went for the win”.

Nice story and he did make the basket. The only problem is that I have seen the video of that play and it wasn’t ANYTHING like that. He had the ball on the left side of the court. He took four or five steps and threw up one of the ugliest hook shots in NBA history. There wasn’t any faking and jab steps and pass fakes. It was four or five steps and then the ugly. Like I said I give him all his props and because he was a baller it went in and they won the game. Congrats. That’s not the point here. The point is that with all of his basketball credentials and awards, he had no idea what happened….or at least didn’t know what he looked like. So of course this ‘got’ me to thinking…..

Sometimes when we are inside of a situation, because we are a participant in the action, we actually have no idea what we look like when we are doing our thing. Wow…I just hurt my own feelings a little. Hold on a minute....ok I’m back. I would push further and say that when emotions are running at a fevered pitch, we don’t have a clue as to what we look like. You might be able to catch yourself, but catching your running mouth in mid-stride does not mean that you haven’t already run too far. I have had very interesting conversations with people who appear to be highly intelligent and capable of intellectual discernment only to find that they begin to behave like small children when they are upset. They hurl insults and begin to criticize, with much vigor and wrath, the very things that they do just because it has happened to them. In other words, they can throw a stone but have a glass body.

I’m going down to the next level and this is the hard part. Even when we notice things about what someone is doing and how horrible it actually is, we have to realize that our only vantage point is one from the outside. There is a strategic advantage in that. You can see what someone is doing better from a distance than the person who is doing whatever can see it. Everybody on the court saw that ugly move and shot Magic did. He thought there was great beauty in the look of it. It is the same thing with us and our own behavior. We can see exactly what that other person is doing. We can tell them all about how sorry and horrible they are. And I would say that we have every right to tell someone when what they have done really, really sucks. But we also have to remember that the other party has the same strategic advantage that we have. They too are able to monitor our behavior from the outside. We can see them, but they can see us as well. Now what we have to do is decide if what we are showing is worthy of viewing pleasure or should our little show be canceled.

Now I can’t tell anyone how to live , but the truth about it is, if we all looked at our actions from the outside in then things would be a lot smoother.