Originally Posted by Josh Waitzkin
One day, when I was 18 or 19 years old I was walking on 33rd street and Broadway in NYC to teach one of my chess classes to my team at PS 116. Every one who has grown up in Manhattan knows that it is important to look both ways before crossing the street--cars run lights and bicyclists often ride the wrong way down a one way street--admittedly, I have been guilty of the latter. To survive in the city one mustn't blindly leave his fate to the traffic light gods. So I was waiting for the light, thinking about the ideas that I would soon be discussing with my students, when I noticed that a woman wearing headphones had walked right into oncoming traffic and was completely oblivious to the chaotic street that she was crossing. Just then, as she looked right, a bicycle bore down on her from the left. The biker lurched away at the last second, but still gave her a harmless bump. This was a critical moment in the woman's life. She had a near miss and could easily have walked away unscathed if she had just stepped back onto the pavement--but instead she turned to the fading bicyclist and cursed his impudence. There she was, standing with her back to the traffic on 33rd and Broadway screaming at the back of a biker who just performed a miracle to avoid smashing into her. If that moment could be frozen in time it would be a terrifying image for us all to weep over and learn from. A taxi cab was the next to speed onto the scene--the woman was struck from behind and sent reeling 10 feet into the air. She smashed into a lamp post and was knocked out and bleeding badly. The ambulance and police came and eventually I walked on to PS 116 only hoping that she might survive.
Regaining presence and clarity of mind after making a serious error is a struggle for all competitors and performers. Great stage actors often miss a line but improvise their way back on track. The audience rarely notices because of the perfect ease with which the performer glides back from troubled waters into the tranquility of the script. What is more, the truly great ones can make the moment work for them--heightening their performance with improvisations that throb with immediacy and life. Cellists, violinists, chess players, actors, basketball players, and countless others all understand that brilliant performances are often born of small errors. The problems set in if the performer has a relationship to his or her art which has a brittle dependence on the safety of absolute perfection or duplication. Then an error shatters the glass menagerie and some clouded state of detachment haunts the decision making process.
Our vision gets cloudier as the position gets further away from us--and we make mistakes that are far beneath our level. Sometimes all a player needs is a bucket of cold water over the head--something to wake us from the lethargic resignation to our emotional swings. With practice and introspective attentiveness, we can learn to be our own cold water.
