Saturday, September 23, 2006

Competition


Last night I took my 9 year old grand son to a Mets game. That's major league base ball to my international friends. I do not ordinarily enjoy major league sports. The hype is over whelming, the fans are absurd and the whole atmosphere seems artificial and simplistic. It is as if the world of whatever sport it happens to be has the only reality. And, in the US, the patriotic nonsense before the game starts makes me ill. Do other countries do this? Never the less I took my grandson for the experience. He, of course, loved it.
There is something quite magical about a large crowd of people all focused, well mostly focused, on a single thing. I love this energy when I am in a theatre watching a play with a few hundred people or at a musical concert of some type. The shared experience can occasionally become something quite magical, depending on the skill of the performers and the attentiveness of the audience. I have many times been in audiences where I felt this deep experience but never at a sporting event.
It isn't that I do not appreciate the skill of the competitors or the sometimes quite exciting feats of athleticism that one might see, no it is not that; I think it is the quite silly behavior of just about everyone involved except for the athletes, and sometimes them as well.
My son in law is a body builder. More then that, he competes and wins. I have been to a few of these events and the hype for them is no less than any other professional athletic event. In fact they are pretty strange. In the case of body building most of the audience is involved in the sport in some fashion, either as competitors, relatives of competitors or people seriously involved in body building who want to see the best. Since I am now an official relative I had to give some thought to my attitude. If it were not for Daron I would pay no attention at all. Since I know him fairly well for the good man and husband and father that he is I had to think about it a lot. Finally I realized that, for Daron, competition is extremely important but, it cannot be just anyone, it can only be against the best available – otherwise it doesn't count. And we get to watch.
All this leads me to conclude that there is something in the human psyche that needs this energy. We are competitive creatures and the best among us absolutely need to test themselves against others at their level. For the rest of us it can mean something quite different. So perhaps, as in my previous blog about the aggressive SUV driver, it is time, for some of us, to cease looking without for something to compete with and instead to look within for the true conflict. Most of us are not world class athletes. Some of us do enjoy competition at some amateur level but a lot of us just compete randomly in a most unpleasant manner. So ask yourself, what is your effect on those around you when you feel the need to compete?

Love & Blessings, Musawwir

The Photo is of my son in law, Daron Lytle, the day he won the 2006 Armed Forces Europe Body Building Championship.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i read the first page and i really liked it. especially the one about u taking your grandson to a met game usually kids do like baseball and baseball is a very excited sport well at least i love baseball . love jojo