WORLD SERIES

Carlton Fisk: "It's not what you achieve, it's what you overcome. That's what defines your career."

Why don’t we dream of our team winning the final World Series? Why, if there was a World Series to determine the winner of baseball, marking the end of the game, would most of us cry rather than cheer? I’m sure there’d be a few fanatics that would go all in, put all their cheering and all their prayers on the line to support their team in becoming the final winner. There might even be an ecstatic moment of excitement if they did pull it off, and some satisfying post-victory bragging. But a few months later, April would roll around and a deep sense of melancholy would start to set in. And a tragic realization would hit like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t the being or not being champion that I was longing for, but the process of becoming champion, the struggle, that provided me a fundamental joy. To be the eternal winner is pure emptiness, meaningless, reduced in some odd way to a sham. So why do so many of us focus on life this way? We approach it, so many times, as though being something is what is important, or like the end is the best part. We do, so we can get. I go to high school so I can get into that college and I go to college so I can get that degree and I get that degree so I can get that job and I do that so I can get that money, so I can get, so I can get, so I can get. The true enjoyer of life finds what gives them pleasure in becoming, sees becoming not as a path to being but as a never ending, enjoyable struggle. They approach life like the unwrapping of a present, without a care for what’s in the box. To be or not to be isn’t the question, the question is to melancholically be or to joyfully become.

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