The Inner Clock

My hierarchy of priorities in the gym are encapsulated in the following acronym: PFRW. This is an easy acronym for me to remember, as I work out at Planet Fitness and used 'rw' quite a bit as a UNIX admin in the 1990s (good old 'chmod'). The acronym stands for Pace, Form, Reps and Weight. In other words, keep to a pace, favor form over reps and favor reps over weight. I typically keep to a 2 minute pace, 5 sets and 16 reps to adhere to my golden rule of NOT ... GETTING ... HURT! I used to count to 60 between sets, as a form of meditation, but I found that using a timer allowed for a better form of meditation, devoid of the constant question of whether or not I was counting at a uniform pace. There are occasions when I keep to a 1 minute pace to accommodate a left then right strategy for a particular exercise, and this is when I discovered something: I inherently get ready for the next set within 1-2 seconds of my timer going off, without any internal counting or other form of awareness. I just get set, and the timer goes off. If I try to count or be aware of the passage of time, then I inevitably get ready too early or too late. If I don't try, then I am right on time. This reminds me of a scene from a wonderful moving called Infinity, starring Matthew Broderick as Richard Feynman: While he was a teenager, he was on his front porch jumping up and down and periodically checking his watch to see if he was keeping pace with time - in reality, to see if his sense of time kept pace with the universe. Of course, seconds are arbitrary units of time, but the passage of time itself may not be arbitrary at all, and our minds may very well be in tune with the pace of the universe in a way that that is intuitive if we listen to it, and disrupted if we try to control it. This 'listening' versus 'controlling' is not a theme that is limited to pace, so I suspect that there are a lot of areas that might benefit from letting go and listening, versus holding on and controlling. One's inner clock benefits from the external, objective clock to gauge accuracy, so applying this to other areas might be a bit more complex, unless one lets go of accuracy altogether, and that might be the real insight here.