Skills to avert looming danger ‘on the way’

The White House is seen behind a stop sign in Washington, DC. If your visual acuity, peripheral vision, eye-hand co-ordination, reflexes and time-space judgements are not Jackie Chan on the playing field, or in other arenas of day-to-day life, don’t assume your driving standard will be any less ordinary. PHOTO/AFP 

In Summary

• Looming is a fine example of what a clever fellow the human brain is.
• Without this instinctive judgement of how far away something is, what direction it is travelling in, and how fast it is approaching,  we would not be able to play any ball sport or interact with any moving object with precision.

By GAVIN BENNETT
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William Shakespeare invented dozens of the most popular and useful expressions in English — like tongue-tied, in a pickle, danced attendance, short shrift, cold comfort, early days, high time, the crack of doom, one fell swoop,  rhyme or reason, good riddance, stony-hearted, bloody-minded, and blinking idiot.

Kenya has also made many contributions to the world’s great lingua franca, with words like “safari”, pop phrases like “hakuna matata”, and concepts like “cousin-brother” and “throw your eyes” and “making a short call”.  We also use old words in new ways, like the peerless idea of “overlapping” when traffic tries to make one lane into three log-jamming queues.

And — if me no ifs, and, but me no buts — Kenya certainly offers the best idiom to describe the physio-sensory phenomenon of “looming”. 

Books of synonyms offer a couple of dozen options, but none lists or matches our unique phrase “on the way coming”.

Looming is a fine example of what a clever fellow the human brain is.  Without this instinctive judgement of how far away something is, what direction it is travelling in, and how fast it is approaching,  we would not be able to play any ball sport or interact with any moving object with precision.

Among other things, we would crash our cars more often and pedestrians would be even more frequently run over when crossing the road. And boxing matches would be very short.

Happily, we can not only judge speed and distance, and compute the optimum reaction, but can do so with incredible exactness.

And, although the degree of acuity varies from one individual to another, we all take this ability for granted. But we shouldn’t.

NO IDEA OF LOOMING

A new-born baby has no idea of looming and will not flinch in anticipation of something approaching, only in reaction to contact with it. A young child might recognise that an object (eg car or ball) is on the way coming,  but is likely to grossly misjudge the speed of its approach or the likely contact point.

 Most adults are pretty good at both speed and angle; some are irredeemably rotten, others are naturally brilliant.

Whatever your own natural aptitude is, you can get better, and be the best you can be, through purposeful practice.

The point is that none of us is born with this judgment; we are born with the potential to acquire it.   

There are a number of driving “lessons” in this: first to recognise that judgment of “looming” is a skill you have to learn;  that individual stages or ability vary considerably; that small children are distinctly ungood at it;  make special allowances for them, and for diverse other road users, and for your own shortcomings.

If your visual acuity, peripheral vision, eye-hand co-ordination, reflexes and time-space judgements are not Jackie Chan on the playing field, or in other arenas of day-to-day life, don’t assume your driving standard will be any less ordinary.

Get on that learning curve. Practice purposefully. Your judgment skills will improve (whoever you are) and reduce the chances that an accident is “on the way coming”. In your direction. Fast.