Parents employ the discipline of giving a child a timeout when he/she needs to reflect upon and then correct the behavior that placed him/her in this isolation. As I was watching sports lately, I became annoyed at all the timeouts that were taken not for teams to necessarily reflect on and correct their performances but for the advertisers to sell their products.
What are we, the viewers, supposed to do during these timeouts from the game? How many times can you take a bathroom break? How many beers do you need to get from the refrigerator? How many times must I think the gecko in the GEICO commercial is clever? Why does a sixty-minute game take three hours? If you gave a kid those many timeouts, the kid would have to get ready for bed before he enjoyed very much play time.
Enough of the rant about lengthy games and repetitive advertisements. The real purpose of this blog is to encourage timeouts for us adults. No, not because we necessarily did anything wrong and need to reflect upon and correct behavior, but that certainly could be a reason for a timeout from our hectic lives.
When was the last time you went on a weekend retreat without social media and technological distractions? When was the last time you got lost in a book that caused you to reflect on and possibly correct some of your flaws (we all have them)? When was the last time you sat in church and really listened to and reflected on the preacher’s message?
If timeouts are effective ways of helping kids learn appropriate behavior, and if sports’ timeouts help the teams to be successful, and if companies’ advertisements during timeouts help consumers buy their products, then why shouldn’t we use timeouts for ourselves? Perhaps the next time we become irritated by the never-ending parade of timeouts during a game, we will remember the intrinsic reason for a timeout: reflection and correction.
Oops, the game is about to resume. Goodbye until the next break (probably in five minutes or so.)
