Trust the process

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I’d be willing to bet that everyone reading this column has seen the 1984 movie “The Karate Kid” at least once. Maybe not all the not-as-great sequels, or the reboot, or the campy TV spinoff show “Cobra Kai” — but at least the original with Ralph Macchio as Daniel-san and Pat Morita as the infinitely quotable Mr. Miyagi, who trains young Daniel in karate, albeit by some rather unconventional methods.

By now, even if you somehow avoided this 40-year-old (that’s crazy) movie, you’ve heard things like, “wax on, wax off,” and “sweep the leg” and “get him a body bag” and such. The whole “wax on…” thing comes from Mr. Miyagi gatting Daniel to wax all of his classic cars. Daniel only sees this as busy work bordering on unpaid labor, but the waxing, along with painting the fence and sanding the floor and other tasks are actually part

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of Daniel’s training, using the muscle memory from all of these repetitive motions to mirror karate techniques.

Eventually, Daniel figures it out. He learns to trust the process. It’s a phrase that basically means, even if you don’t understand why something is done in a certain way or how it is ultimately going to work, you need to trust the process ans see how it pays off in the long run.

Although the phrase has been around a long time, the idea became popularized in 2013 by Sam Hinkie, general manager of the Philadelphis 76ers, who adopted the mantra as he worked to rebuild the team into a playoff contender.

While Hinkie’s “process” resulted in a slow build, the 76ers made it to the NBA Eastern Conference semifinals in 2017, a big improvement over the team’s 1-21 start in 2015.

I think it’s a pretty good lesson in patience and commitment. You can apply it ro all sorts of things. I remember during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic we were getting all of these rules an guidelines and a lot of people wailed and moaned about “their rights” and such, how mask mandates were stupid and how the vaccine gives you 5G (or something, I stopped paying attention after a while).

You see the same thing with things like weight loss or paying off credit card debt or getting your home organized. There’s no magic button you can push to make these things just happen. You have to trust the process, whether it’s diet and exercise, cutting back on spending, doing one closet or drawer at a time, there’s a process that has been shown to work.

You just have to trust it.

I think that’s what we need to do with our whole country right now. We have a process, the U.S. Constitution , that has proven to work for 250 years. Let’s trust the process and see where we end up…