Photo: D. Paul Graham / Time, Watkins Glen 2022

“Monday 5 Things” ™ ….. Marked Time …..

Time. Five days that focused on time. Departure and arrival times. Session times, start times, lap times, finish times. Prep time for the team to get the cars ready for testing and racing. Time through the bus-stop, the esses, the boot, the heel, the toe. Time between corners to photograph beautiful cars at speed. Time to observe, to contemplate, to appreciate.

Time well spent at Watkins Glen, but not enough time to properly finish what I had planned for today. This morning’s M5T digs into the archives and reconsiders wisdom and life lessons that are only discovered with time.

1. Heart

Having a heart can mean many things. It can be the ability and emotional maturity to show compassion and kindness for others. Having a heart is learning to be merciful and gracious. Finding the strength to dig deeper when you have no energy to keep moving to the finish line. Keeping the intensity to win, the fortitude to persevere. It can be finding your own will and your true nature. It’s taking positivity over negativity; finding self-esteem, courage, and confidence in who you are and what you are doing.

2. Vision

Vision develops over time. It’s clarity of purpose, allowing you the freedom to pursue your dreams and achieve goals and objectives. It creates the framework for your plans and decisions, and gives you focus to overcome obstacles along the way. It can be your inspiration, remove self-imposed limits, and be a means to calculate and mitigate risk. Your vision can define who you are, where you want to be, and can transform your dreams into reality.

3. Action

Action is so much more than being busy. It is moving forward with single minded tenacity. Actions always have a means to an end. It is resolutely pushing through pressure and crisis. It is applying lessons learned from failures and life changing events. Proper action is knowing the difference between fundamental issues needed to achieve your goals and being busy for the sake of looking busy. It means learning to say no to others. It requires an unyielding and disciplined conviction to achieve. Action requires planning and setting time aside for important issues that are key to your vision and dreams. It is smart repetition of the things that work, dogged determination to ignore the clutter and noise of others telling you what you should do, and an obstinate desire to figure things out.

4. Sense

Time reveals that common sense is not all that common. Developing your personal sense of what and who is around you is a learned skill. Learning about people; what motivates them, what excites them, what angers them and what pleases them is a skill that only comes from experience. Taking risks to trust and to interact takes time. Relying on your ‘gut’ with first impressions; making decisions; having a baseline of situational experience and watching for deviations and inconsistencies is foundational to reliance and acting on the inner voice of your senses.

5. Travel

You can read about other countries and culture; and you can meet with their people, but the lessons learned from them can only be achieved by going. Experience and wisdom learned from travel is simply priceless. Your horizons are broadened when you travel with an open mind and acceptance of new ideas, places, smells, tastes, traditions, and languages. Travel enhances your tolerance. It increases your confidence, teaches self-awareness, and takes you outside your personal comfort zone. Travel educates by the diversity of other cultures and the world. Travel refreshes, challenges, teaches, and builds memories that will never fade. It is the gift of changed perspective; through places and situations that you may never have imagined.

Here’s to a week of wherever, whatever, and with whomever you choose to spend your time and to making time to appreciate life lessons.

© 2022 D. Paul Graham, all rights reserved.

For over 10 years, D. Paul Graham has published “Monday 5 Things” ™, also known to readers as M5T ™.  Each Monday, Paul shares his observations, thoughts and passions on people, life, and culture.

You can find M5T each Monday here on www.southmag.com and by friending D. Paul Graham on Facebook. Paul is a contributing photographer to South Magazine. His photographic work can also be found on Instagram @dpgraham and at www.imageGRAHAM.com . Your feedback is always welcome. Email Paul at dpg@imagegraham.com