When the athlete but also each of us asks ourselves, “Will I make it through this performance successfully?” we can do so in two opposite ways. The first is that which arises from insecurity and anxiety that we are not capable enough and generates thoughts of excessive worry and dislike of ourselves. With this approach it is likely that the outcome of the performance will be negative. The second approach comes, instead, from the curiosity of wanting to see what will happen by performing at our best, if we can make the possible (winning) real (having won). This second attitude highlights the person’s patience in expressing an evaluation only at the end of the performance, paying attention to what needs to be done to achieve the goal.
The philosopher Michel Foucault illustrated this concept most clearly:
“Curiosity … … evokes “care”, the attention one pays to what exists or what could exist, an acute sense of reality, but one that does not freeze in the face of it, a readiness to judge strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain doggedness to discard what is familiar and to look at the same things differently, a going out to grasp what happens and what passes, a nonchalance with the traditional hierarchies between what is important and what is essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity.” (M. Foucault, The Masked Philosopher, in A. Pandolfi (ed.), 1998).
Curiosity should push us not to become immobilized or frightened in the face of reality, represented by performance and sporting hierarchies, and invite us to look at things differently and to be totally absorbed in our actions.
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