Tag: Kobe

Your house’s on fire!

I came across a clip of an interview of Kobe, the legendary basketball player who passed away in an air crash earlier this year.

The interviewer was talking about a game, where both teams had to do a tie-breaker of final throws. Once Kobe’s turn came, he had a Achilles tendon, yet he got up, made his throw, and finished the game like a star.

When asked about the reason, Kobe said:

“Let’s say you have an Achilles, your hamstring is torn, your doctor tells you to have a bed rest, not move at all. So you’re at your home.

And suddenly, the house’s on fire. The kids are upstairs, the wife is somewhere else, and now you have to save them. You will instantly forget your hamstring, grab your kids, make sure your wife is safe, and get out of the house. You won’t remember the hamstring because your family is more important than the injury. So when the game is more important than the injury itself, you don’t feel that injury.”

When the game is more important than the injury itself, you don’t feel that injury.

What is the game that we are into?

Injury or the kind that Kobe was into?

Do we know that we don’t know?

Five seconds.

Just five seconds.

Just five seconds before he would have known that it’s going to be over.

What would have crossed Kobe Bryant’s mind when that did happen?

Perhaps a feeling of satisfaction and happiness for living a life he was proud of.

Perhaps the fact that he should have said “I love you” more often to people who mattered the most.

Perhaps the tragedy to see his daughter die along with him.

Perhaps none of these.

Whatever that may be, none of us know the time till when we are here.

Neither the one with the most money, nor the one who knows the most influential people.

All of us are cut from the same cloth of anonymity.

That’s what makes this life worth understanding and living.

Understanding and living.

Not postponing. No more “my time will come”, rather, my time is already here.

Right now. Otherwise, literally, never.