Craving Crows
It’s March and the sports world is about to go mad. Conference basketball tournaments, the opening acts for the much-ballyhooed big dance, are calling from just around the bend. In a now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t flash, the ball will be tipped, the champion will be crowned, and the confetti will fall from the rafters. Then in the next frantic breath-- sometimes only minutes after the last buzzer sounds—the selection committee will release the 2024 Men’s and Women’s NCAA tournament brackets. Immediately following that, almost everyone—both those included and those who get left out—will find a way to somehow think that they’ve been wronged. The first four out will state their case for why they should have made the cut while the top four seeds will clamor about how unfairly stacked their designated region is. Those in between will mostly claim that their team should be sitting on a different line or facing a different opponent or packing for another geographic locale. Satisfaction, like my Walgreens readers, will be tough to find.
We, the people, can be hard to please.
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Perhaps it’s the land of plenty’s fault, this inability so many of us have to feel good about what we’ve got. Satisfaction can be creepy-crawly like that. It has the shades and hues of a chameleon—at once “a state of fulfillment” and a “thing that we feel owed.” Two related meanings with slipery space between. The vast majority of us swim with wants in very little need of anything, and yet we itch. With unprecedented access to images and information-- to opportunity and thus possibility--what we used to have to imagine (or be unable to), we now can visibly see. Things we don’t have, ways we don’t look, places we can’t go bombard us. Pining-for-more—or just for different-- becomes our default mode. In the irony of ironies, because of all we do have, we tend to stub our toe on all we don’t.
One of my granddaughter’s worn-out books is a story of a crow. The crow, in the beginning, is as happy as a lark. He flies around wherever he wants doing whatever he pleases. Then one day while passing over a pond, he sees a beautiful swan. Immediately, he wonders how it must feel to be so elegant and refined. That swan must be so happy, he thinks. So he asks her what it’s like—to be so fulfilled— because, suddenly, somehow he no longer knows. The swan says she’s not (so happy and fulfilled, that is) but that she used to be before she met a parrot.
A parrot has two colors, she explains. A swan has only one. So the crow goes to visit the parrot who was the most beautiful bird the crow had ever seen. He asks the green and blue bird what it’s like to be so grand. The parrot says he’s not the one to ask. “You should see the peacock,” he told the crow. “Now that’s a beautiful bird.”
So the crow goes to talk to the peacock who lived at the local zoo. The bird was indeed the most amazing creature he had ever seen. People came daily just to admire its multi-colored fan. The crow asked the peacock what it was like to be so happy and fulfilled. The peacock says, “Happy? Fulfilled? I am trapped in a cage. Daily, I watch crows flying around wherever they want, doing whatever they please. You, Mr. Crow, tell me.”
My Austyn likes the pictures, the raised textures on the feathers of the birds, but I hope the message somehow finds a way inside her tiny bones. “I can’t get no…” sang the Rolling Stones. Satisfaction can be a tough nut to crack.
“I love our draw,” will not be a phrase we’ll hear a lot from coaches (and from fans!) in the upcoming weeks. As soon as the championship scaffolding is revealed, almost everyone will have a bone to pick. Expert “bracketologists” will lead the chorus of all that could have been done better as well as the battle cry for all who feel they have been handed the short end of the stick. “Comparison,” as our 26th president so aptly stated, “[will be] the thief of joy.”
While a refusal to be satisfied is often part of the concoction that drives us to excel, it can become a force field that fences happy out. The line of demarcation is sometimes wavy and almost always pencil thin. On one side fulfillment beckons, on the other discontent begs. The former turns us into a striver, the latter into a sea squirt who ends up eating himself.
P.S. The Rolling Stones