What it’s all about
I guess I’ve finally figured it out, but it took me long enough. I’ll describe the two scenarios.
Late last evening I found myself in a Greek pizzeria in the middle of nowhere U.S.A. (otherwise known as Rutland, MA). I was sitting with a group of families that I have come to love being around in the last few years. We talked about football, medicine, Spanish (yes, my wife was involved), and community. I shared about me, and listened about them, and in the end, I had this incredible sense of fulfillment that I did not have even 2 hours before.
Earlier in the evening I played basketball with about 20% of the group in the pizzeria (our wives and children joined us for the festivities). We played hard and we had fun, but in the end we came up short. I was sick. Not in the ‘my stomachs a bit too queasy and I think I have the swine’ sense, but more like the ‘I want to kick these bleachers across nowhere U.S.A’ sense. I couldn’t believe we lost, and in the end – like most guys in the competitive world – I blamed myself. “I could have done more,” assumed my internal thoughts battling for justification.
Then Carie and I drove to the pizzeria and enjoyed the company of most of the team.
And it was then, after only 34 years of living on this earth that it finally hit me. I mean, I knew this intellectually, but not actually. We could have won the game, and our smiles would have been a bit bigger and our conversation a bit more animated, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was the time I was spending with these friends, and the vehicle by which I met up with these friends happened to be basketball. It could have been bridge or rummy or the 2nd episode of “House” on Fox, but it was basketball, and yet I finally realized (for real) that it wasn’t about the basketball at all. That was just the vehicle, that one day when I get too old, I’ll trade in for the vehicle of golf. I realized driving home from the pizzeria that evening that the reason I played in the first place was the friendships that are developing. And I went home much more satisfied than even if we had won the game.
But I still hope the Steelers don’t learn this principle this year.
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Would it be disrespectful and a breech of blogcomment etiquette to say, “duh”?
I couldn’t help but think of the movie City Slickers when I read this when they kept trying to find the “meaning of life”. Glad you learned what you needed to learn though, God is great like that