This past weekend, I took a break and watched a lot of college football and smoked a brisket. I made a commitment to myself to not do any work on Saturday and do some things that I enjoy doing. It was liberating, but at the same time, exhausting. If you have ever smoked a brisket, it is a 12 hour process, and at times, it feels like time is standing still because it takes forever to get to the end product. While I waited, I had the opportunity to do a lot of reflection and ponder the notion of being trapped in a time void where each passing second is agonizing and painful. It would be very easy to use the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of time standing still, but in the spirit of taking a break from our current reality, it might be more appropriate to look at some situations where it felt like time was standing still. Because my weekend was filled with football, let me provide a couple of examples that run close to home.
ARKANSAS RAZORBACKS FOOTBALL
If you ever would have told me that I would be writing a blog that included the Arkansas Razorbacks as an example, I would have told you that you were nuts. I am, however, an adopted son to the State of Arkansas, so the Hogs have become my adopted team. This past weekend marked the first home win for the Razorbacks since November of 2016. Earlier this year, they snapped a 3 year skid of not winning a SEC conference game. For all intents and purposes, Razorback fans are to the college football world as Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox fans are to Major League Baseball before they won world titles. They all have fan bases who love their teams, but their performances were less than desired. It has been a long road for the Hogs to get to this point and I am sure that the passing of time has been difficult. Talk to any Razorback fan and they will speak of the good ol' days when the team was competitive and relevant and they long to revert to the glory days or fast forward to when this happens again. For now, we will just need wait and see what happens next, but we can celebrate a little bit because we finally broke through.
NEBRASKA CORNHUSKERS FOOTBALL
This example is more in my wheelhouse because I am a Husker fan to the core. It's also a little more complex than the Razorback example because of the history. The Cornhuskers are the only Division I football program in the State of Nebraska and Memorial Stadium becomes the 3rd largest city in the state on game days. Husker fans love their football and that is why they have sold out every home game since 1962 (375 consecutive games). They are best known for their 3 national championships in 1994, 1995, and 1997, but what is lost in those titles is 20 years prior and the 20 years since the last title. In the years before the titles, the head coach (Tom Osborne) won at least 9 games every season, but he couldn't win the BIG ONE. In the years since, the program has had 5 coaches, has switched conferences, and has only won 9+ games 14 times. For a state that lives and dies on the success of its proud football program, time has stood still for a long time and each hit to the program results in more agony and defeat to the people that follow it. Husker fans long for the light at the end of the tunnel when the program becomes relevant again, but in the ever changing landscape of college football, this is becoming more and more difficult because it's hard to recruit kids to the plains and tell them they get to play in the cold and snow.
WHAT IT ALL MEANS
The passing of time is weird. When things are going good, you want time to slow down so you can soak everything up and get every ounce of joy out of each second. When things are going bad, time seems to stand still and you long for a fast forward button to get you out of the situation you are currently in. Thus, the paradox is that when we want time to slow down it actually flies by and when we want time to speed up, it actually slows down. The reality is, of course, that time keeps ticking away and our perception of time is what causes us to react how we do.
Time is finite and we cannot escape it. When our time is up, the dash between our start and end times is going to tell the story, so we need to decide what we want that dash to say about us. We are going to have moments of bliss as well as moments of sorrow. We are all going to experience the ebbs and flow of life, but we get to decide if we are going to strive for the peaks or set up shop in the valley. I choose to focus on the peaks because that is where I want to spend my time. Doing so takes a lot of work, especially when time seems to be standing still, but I keep putting one foot in front of the other because I will reach the peak at some point and at the right time. In the meantime, I'll take the time I have and find the little things to celebrate so I don't get stuck in the paradox of time.
#ONWARD
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