Can you predict the future too?

We’ve all had those moments where we just know what’s going to happen next…

We just know.

It happened on my recent Irish trip while watching an Arsenal vs. Liverpool soccer game with my niece and nephew.

They’re Liverpool, I’m Arsenal.

Rowan & Leah are both involved in multiple sports: rowing, soccer, Gaelic football, hurling, swimming.

Four or five days a week, they’re involved in the ebb and flow of different games.

But now in the comfort of their stove-heated living room, Arsenal were ahead, and I was enjoying my coffee and homemade berry pie very much indeed.

But then a Liverpool player got the ball on the halfway line, and his teammates swarmed forward in attack.

Leah’s body straightened, her face lit up, and she kept repeating:

“Goal, goal, goal, goal, goal” in an even voice.

There was something about the movement of the players that she recognized. The patterns made sense to her.

Her experience was letting her see into the future… and she was rolling with it!

I was as fascinated watching her as I was watching the game.

As the Liverpool winger crossed to an unmarked teammate in the penalty box, her chant continued, evenly, at the same pace.

The forward received the ball and stroked it back across the goalkeeper into the far corner…

Goal.

While Rowan and his Dad celebrated, Leah just smiled.

“How the heck did you guess that?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“Just the way they moved, I dunno, I just knew they’d score.”

Well now.

And not to be outdone, later in the same game, Rowan had a stab at predicting the future.

Arsenal were on the attack, there was a scramble in the box… kicks, nudges, blocks… and Rowan got a chant of his own going…

“Penalty, penalty, penalty…”

And thirty seconds later, an Arsenal player went down, and the whistle blew.

Penalty.

Now I don’t come from a long line of clairvoyants… or at least not that I know of!

So what was going on?

I thought back to one of the first surfing lessons I had in Lahinch, Co. Clare, Ireland.

A cold, grey day, angry whitecaps, stiff offshore breeze.

Good surfing conditions.

Donncha pointed out far beyond the breakers and said:

“Watch the water for twenty minutes before getting in.”

The idea is this: the ocean is unpredictable and changes wave by wave, minute by minute.

To jump straight in you’d be guessing at where to paddle towards, or the wave frequency, or height.

But if you watch the way the waves break for at least twenty minutes, you get a sense of how the water is behaving over a longer period.

You begin to see the patterns.

You see where the waves rise, which way they break, how many are in a set, how long of a lull before the next set, which means you know how long you have to paddle out in relatively calm water without the whitewater mushing you.

And sure enough, watch it long enough, when you eventually do get in the water, you can almost “predict” what the waves will do next.

You know where the interval will be, you know where to wait for the next wave, and when it comes – sometimes after a wait of ten, fifteen minutes bobbing on the still water – there’s a shift inside you, and you just know.

So you drop your chest onto your board, paddle hard, and wait for the water to lift you…

And I recently discovered the same applies to photography, specifically street photography.

I’ve been doing a lot of it recently, and while watching an instructional video yesterday, the photographer said the same thing about crowds…

Stand back for ten, fifteen minutes, and watch how the crowd moves.

You begin to get a sense of the rhythm of how people stop, start, speed up, turn, where they catch the light, what they might react to and even where their eye might be drawn at a certain point.

I applied this practice to my feathered friends in the photo.

The sun was casting a nice shadow, and there was a good mixture of birds on the land and in the water.

So I watched their movement for a while and noticed their patterns.

Of course, individual birds fluttered all over the place most of the time.

But, over time, I noticed they all started to do the same thing.

Echo Park Lake has lots of walkers and sitters who feed the birds or leave scraps of food behind them.

That’s what all these winged wonders were ultimately looking for.

And where one goes, another is sure to follow.

I wanted to take a shot which gave a sense of a few birds all going in the same direction to some unseen destination.

And so I framed up, kept one eye on the swimming birds and another on the walkers, and after many attempts, got these two proud beauties on a quest to somewhere, one of them mid-stride as if marching to an unseen drum.

We live in a world of repetition, patterns and habits.

And though I don’t think we can exactly predict the future, when we observe enough of how the world moves around us, we can sometimes let the world fall into our vision of the future we want.