Concentrate On The Here And Now

BE here right now – and no we are not talking about the hit album for English rock band Oasis in 1997!

Being in the moment is more the theme here, to really appreciate what it is we are doing at any moment in time.

Naked Leader founder David Taylor has always advocated it and reading A Book For Heroes, by Simon Barnes, the chapter on the former England cricket captain Colin Cowdrey, was fascinating.

The then 42-year-old was called out of a three-and-a-half year international exile to play for England against Australia because they needed him. He risked his status as a cricketing ‘great’ for the good of his country, because ‘I just wanted to go and see if I could do it.’

Barnes reflects: ‘Athletes are very seldom interested in the past. Come to that, they are not much interested in the future.

‘It is the present that absorbs them; perhaps this rare talent for living in the moment is a defining trait of great athletes. Doing it is what absorbs them, being there.’

Then there is the other Naked Leader theory that there is nothing to stop us doing anything, just as we did as a child, before conscious thoughts hindered our progress.

It is this very subject that Cowdrey touched on when he was asked what his secret for sporting success was. Cowdrey observed: ‘You must be perpetually two-years-old.’

On this aspect Barnes added: ‘Life can then be reduced to the passage of ball from hand to bat to boundary. It is then not the most important but the only thing in the world.

‘And so life in the now becomes the only conceivable reality. Perhaps all sporting heroes, perhaps all heroes of every kind, need at least in some part of themselves to be perpetually two-years-old. Perhaps we all do.’

Wise words indeed and as David recently tweeted, “I can do” and “I will do” are not the same as “I am doing” or “I have done.”

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