The difference between coaches and players is typically experience. Seeing the big picture often requires foresight and foresight improves with historical data.
When a relatively good team is being beaten up by a relatively bad team, the coach of the good teams will focus on sticking to fundamentals while the coach of the bad team will focus on staying in the zone.
Both coaches expect a regression to the mean.
➕
There are more than a few expressions that personify this mathematical phenomenon.
The Noun to Verb construct: Players gonna play.
The Noun to Adjective: Steph Curry doing Steph Curry Things.
The idea is that there is an inescapable truth that will eventually arise no matter the current reality.
Your true colors.
➕
Language can be a lens into the cultural identity of a community. Indigenous Alaskans having multiple words for snow is indicative of their environment. Corporations don’t casually choose a name for their customers because they understand the importance of their relationship.
The German language has a word that is often unfairly used to connect the personality of the German people with the atrocities of World War II.
Schadenfreude is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. Schadenfreude is a complex emotion where, rather than feeling sympathy, one takes pleasure from watching someone’s misfortune. — Wikipedia
The characterization of this phrase implies that, while every human being may experience this emotion to some degree, Germans experience it enough to need a word for it.
Germans gonna German.
Here’s where this concept became personal to me.
➕
NYU Educator and Creative Reginé Gilbert posed this question on the bird app and I couldn’t let it go:
I’d never given much thought to the expression ‘it is what it is’ until I read the comments that followed. The attempt to correlate the exact assembly of words stumbled around the construct but was missing the underlying reality.
Inevitable pain.
The attempts to measure that single phrase that I’ve heard countless elders say in passing helped explain to me that their words were being heard but not their emotions.
The best example of this was the comparison to ‘que sera sera’, a phrase popularized by Doris Day in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. The translation: whatever will be, will be.
The misstep in this comparison is that que sera sera involves a choice made by the future or an outside factor. Essentially, time will decide. The religious will denote that it’s in God’s hands now.
This leaves a chance for hope, though a regression to the mean may be inevitable.
But it’s the hope that’s important.
It’s the chance that has meaning.
It is what it is has no hope.
It is exact.
It has been decided.
It is gonna it.
The use of that phrase by elders is their observation that the data has shown them the answer. An exact answer.
There’s at least some hope in the expression ‘whatcha gonna do?’
Even the concept of ‘you get what you get’ implies a delivery mechanism that could potentially be avoided.
But when it just is, it just is.
Period.
That’s how you are intended to feel that declaration.
➕
My hope in saying this out loud is twofold.
First, my hope is that future generations have no use for such an expression. Police brutality and voter suppression don’t have be what they be. The struggle to change involves hope and the fight has fire.
Second, that hope might not be a reality in everyone’s eyes. For folks who’ve ‘seen some shit’ the concept of ‘it is what is’ can be difficult to ignore. Don’t discount their feelings of abandonment because they’ve created a colloquialism that comforts you and, perhaps, soothes even themselves.
The therapeutic nature of words is why we journal about growing up and write songs about breaking up.
Sometimes those words are small, but the weight is heavy.
➕
Good things.