Saturday, November 21, 2020

The judgement of a split second

 It was 2017. I was in London for a conference. As it was hard to find a cheap and decent hotel around the conference center, I stayed away from London in a smaller town named Burgess Hill and decided to take the bus - I explicitly remember bus # 523. It was summertime, so it was good to walk and enjoy the bus ride.

One eve., as I was on this side of the road, I saw bus #523 at the stop on the other side of the road. I thought I could jaywalk the main road and catch the bus. I had an old English man standing beside me. He said: "Don't Do! There is no way you can catch that bus". Knowing my skills of catching buses from Karachi, I asked, 'how you know?' He smiled in the classic English style and answered in an accent. "I know because when you live in an area for decades, you gain enough experience and the skill of judgment of a split second." 

For many days, I thought about his notion of the judgment of a split second. Indeed, when you get experience in any matter of life, what makes you superior to a novice is a split second, which makes the difference. The whole wisdom is about gaining that split of a second.

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