Sunday, November 27, 2022
Sunday Reflection: Victory!
Those of you who know me will know that I thrive on the change of seasons. Here in Minnesota we are turning towards 3-5 months of real winter, which means we are going to need our famous snowplows like Betty Whiteout (pictured above).
One marker of the season is the annual Michigan-Ohio State game, which I got to watch with my dad, a lifelong Michigan fan (even though he didn't go there; he went to Cornell). It was a great game and Michigan won 45-23, which qualifies as a shellacking for them-- though really it was a pretty close game most of the way. I loved seeing Michigan win, in part because Ohio State is the locus of evil, but mostly because they don't do that a lot in this game.
After the game, which was in Columbus, the Wolverines looked pretty happy even though they were in hostile territory. The season isn't over-- they will have at least two more games, the league championship and then a bowl game-- but this was a huge threshold crossed.
People cared a lot about the outcome, which of course doesn't mean anything at all except for the importance we attach to it. Many of us just decide to care a lot about this weird game played between college students, and thus it becomes important.
Not that it's a bad thing. It's good to care about things, of course, to believe in them and hope for an outcome.
One appeal of sports, I think, is that we know so clearly the outcome we desire-- for our team to win! The rest of life isn't like that. If you ask most people what they want the outcome of their life to be, you probably will get a puzzled look or a request for some time to think about it. Oddly, we tend not to define that very often.
Some people, of course, will say they want the outcome of being rich or of being happy. Neither one is very deep, of course, or lasting.
So what is it, the outcome you want?
