Not sunk in yet…

 

That’s golfer Jamie Donaldson’s response to having played the final winning shot for the European team at the Ryder Cup on Sunday.

‘It’s not sunk in yet…’

 

That’s what sportsmen and women say when they achieve some important milestone. All of them. It’s become the standard cliché. And usually in answer to the same question, ‘How does it feel…?’

But what does it really mean?

‘I’ve been working very hard and don’t know how to access my feelings at this point’?

‘I don’t have any feelings now, but I might later’?
‘That’s such a stock question, so here’s a stock answer’?

When they say it, I always wonder how it will be different when it has finally ‘sunk in’, and how they might recognise that that moment has arrived..

When it finally has 'sunk in', is the feeling usually better or worse than in the immediate aftermath? I suppose the expectation is that it will be better, but, for example with silver medal winners, research shows that it’s worse – and probably, sadly, from the outset.

How do I feel about this blogpost, now that it’s written? It’s not…