The Rain Dance

A kind reader suggested that a good topic was to be found in the proverb, “The outcome of a rain dance has a lot to do with timing.” And of course, the reader is always right! In this case, very much so.

The notion has much to do with strategic timing, and all that entails. In other words, we will be much more successful when we do the right thing in the right way at the right time.

Timing is something like the placement of a fulcrum below a lever – the more precise the placement, the greater the leverage. So it is with timing – too soon or too late may actually mean utter failure, but mostly it just depreciates your result.

Alexander Pope put the saying in the obverse: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” By failing to size up a situation, particularly the timing, we get ourselves in terrible jams. Well, maybe not you, but I certainly do.

My hunting friends tell me that to successfully shoot a duck, you must aim a little ahead of it so that the duck and the shot arrive in the same place at the same time. Similarly, taking on a task before you have the resources and know-how in place can mean, at the least, you will be less efficient and have a poorer outcome than if you had waited until you had, well, all your ducks in a row.

Wayne Gretzky was not known as the “Great One” for nothing. His gifting was mostly about timing – he had an amazing sense of where he and all the other players would be in the next moment, and was able to send the puck (sight unseen) to the right team member at the right time to achieve the right result.

Of course there’s such a thing as bureaucratic strangulation, or overplanning anything. We can study things to death while the moment passes us by. But that’s not an argument against timing, in fact, it’s just another example of bad timing.

“To everything there is a season,” said the Wise Man, and he was right. The trick is in perceiving the season.