Tag Archives: Boxing Clock

counting down ….

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Counting down …

We all have things we count down for.

Sometimes it is something grand like a fight and sometimes just the tick-tock of the clock till the end of the work day.

When I get anxious, I like to think of things in three-minute intervals, plus the sixty-second rest.

It’s a way of organizing my thoughts which otherwise race around in what my old Dharma teacher used to call a monkey mind.

If I set the clock, I can think of things in finite terms. I can count out each second, or count out other things such as the number of sit-ups I can do in three minutes or the number of words I can write, or the amazing amount of tasks that can be completed in between the buzzers.

Imagine, one can actually pretty much empty a sink full of dishes, or run down four flights of stairs, grab the mail from the mailbox and come back upstairs and find that the clock hasn’t even hit yellow yet.

At other times the clock provides order out of chaos.  It quells the what-do-I-do-now panic of momentary indecision, or worse, the I-can’t-get-started rut can be kicked into gear to a set menu of things to achieve–even if that just means taking an interval or two to calm down.

I bring this up as person facing deadlines and the stress that accompanies that. Thinking of the clock and the ding of the round though is helping to soothe me. In breaking things down into the tiny snippets of time I am reminding myself that no matter how daunting something may seem, it is only ever made up of moments; moments that follow one upon another each carrying its own weight and import.

Much as when I train, I can set aside so many rounds for one thing followed by a set number of rounds for another.

In their totality the time winds up to be the same as what had been originally allotted, but somehow in breaking it down into smaller bits, one can see and touch the progress as so many things that have already been accomplished.

 

 

Time and the clock

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Time and the clock.

My daughter’s alarm clock is blaring through her door as regular pulses reminiscent of the loud echoing blasts announcing a prisoner escape.  How she is sleeping through it amazes me.  Her strategy is to have multiple devices yell at her land of nod until one or another pierces the veil of her dreamscape enough for her to join the world of the awake.  She then stumbles up and out of her room towards the bathroom and the beginning of her morning.

It puts me in mind of how much of what we do is regulated by time.

We have the “masters” of the industrial revolution to thank for that one; having invented mechanized devices as the means of production, they needed a “regular” workforce to man and woman those machines.  Hence our alarm clocks which still beckon us (more like rip us) from the delicious warmth of bed and dreams into the world of work and dare I say a bit of drudgery???

Not so the boxer’s time clock!  Least ways not in my estimation.

Those intervals of time feel more like the explosions of musical notes with three minutes to blow your ax before resting and blowing again.

Shadow boxing around my living room gets to feel like an improvisational dance, throwing punches this way and that as I circle my way left then right, hop skipping forward or to the side, my arms flailing at the air to their own rhythm.  Then the dead s-t-o-p before repeating it all again — and yet different.

A jazzed solo, the improvisation of a boxing performance has all of the nuanced grace of a horn pushing out its notes in a staccato rhythm all its own and yet timed and lovely and full of melodic undertones, the dance of the body fluid and full of the momentum that pushes it from one posture to another for three full minutes before the ding of the bell signals the end of the round.