Modern Koan

Since nobody asked me about it, I'll go ahead and answer my own question from last week.

Last Sunday's Super Bowl broadcast lasted for about 3 1/2 hours, from 6:30 to about 10:00 pm Eastern Standard Time.  But everybody knows they only played 60 minutes of football during that 210-minute broadcast - the rest of the time was spent in commercials, the halftime show, time-outs, and so forth.

But how much football was actually played?  During that 60 minutes of playing time, how much time was actually spent running, throwing, blocking, and so forth, and how much of the time was the clock just allowed to run?  

To find out, I used the stop-watch function on my iPod during the game to clock the actual playing time, starting the watch each time the ball was snapped and ending it when the play was finally whistled dead. It helped keep me engaged in a game where I didn't otherwise have a real interest or a clear-cut favorite.

So how much actual playing time do you think elapsed during the Super Bowl?  45 minutes?  30 minutes?  Or less?

The actual cumulative play time, between snaps of the ball and the ends of the play, was 13 minutes and 21.06 seconds.  Less than a fourth of the 60 minutes of play, less than a tenth of the 3.5-hour broadcast.  To put it another way, for every one minute of play, they aired more than nine minutes of something else.

Considering that both sides field separate teams for offense and defense, any given athlete was playing for roughly half of that 13:21.06, or about 6 minutes and 40 seconds.  That's a mere 3.2% of the 210 minutes of broadcast time.  For the remaining 96.8% of the time, they were either on the bench, in the locker room, on the sidelines, or on the field but not actually playing. 

I can do that.  I can sit on the bench or wait in the locker room every bit as well as any member of the Seahawks or the Broncos.  I can huddle with the best of them.  I can even walk back to the line of scrimmage.

The difference is in that 3.2% of the time.  That six and two-thirds of a minute out of three and a half hours is all that separates me from a Richard Sherman or a Peyton Manning.  96.8% of the time, I'm just as good as either one of them, and with the right uniform, padding, and helmet, I would have been indistinguishable from a member of either team.  But in those brief moments between the time the ball was snapped and the play was called dead, everybody in the stadium, even up in the cheap seats, would have immediately recognized the difference between them and me.  Not to mention the television audience.

There's an obvious analogy for life here.  For the vast majority of our time, our abilities are all the same and none of us have any real advantage or disadvantage over anyone else.  But there's a small fraction of our lives where small differences in our abilities or fortune or advantage might become manifested, and it's in that small fraction of time that fortunes are made and lost, hearts are won or broken, impressions are made, and our fate is cast.

The problem is we're not informed in advance when those moments are going to arrive, so it's to our advantage to be mindful at all times, ready for the unexpected opportunity, ready to be at our best, our kindest, our most loving, our most generous.  Without mindfulness, the moment might even pass without our even knowing it.  Can we afford not to be mindful?

Mindfulness practices like meditation can help us to be present in each moment and not lost in memories of the past or in fantasies of the future.  It can help us encounter each moment of our lives as it arises and react and behave in accordance with actual conditions, not our misperceptions or delusions.