‘When you look at the big picture, big moments constitute a minuscule part of life.’
The cricket World Cup is upon us. As with any big event, there is a lot of anticipation and drama that comes along with it.
World Cups, the Olympics, Grand Slams, all of them are extravaganzas in their own right and the attention that they get is justified.
For any big event, preparations begin in advance and all efforts are channeled towards teams and players peaking at the right time.
But when you look at the big picture, big moments constitute a minuscule part of life.
World Cups and the Olympics happen every four years.
When asked to describe the most memorable moment in his playing career, Sachin Tendulkar always says the World Cup win in 2011, which was also his last chance at World Cup glory.
When you look at his career in entirety, the World Cup win constituted a minuscule part of his legendary career. He played for 24 years and in 5 World Cups. He has surely accumulated countless memories to last many lifetimes, the World Cup victory being the one that stands out.
Buzz Aldrin along with Neil Armstrong, was one of the two astronauts to walk on the moon in 1969. On his return, he suffered from depression and alcoholism. As this article says:
‘This is one of the animating grievances of Buzz’s life — that nothing in the post-moon world ever lived up to those strange bright hours away from earth. ‘I’d been to the moon, I’d traveled around but what would I do next? So I felt discouraged, disappointed and like I wasn’t a part of it.’
It took him decades to overcome his numerous challenges and find some semblance of normality.
After India won the World Cup in 2011, they followed it up with a miserable series in England where they lost the test series 0–4. It was as if all the wind had been knocked out of them after winning the World Cup and they hadn’t really planned on life after the life-altering victory.
We put a lot of emphasis on the big moments, the big wins, the big events. We also mortgage a lot of our happiness for some big event in the future.
Marriages
The birth of a child
A big promotion
Starting your own business
Selling your business
Retiring
All of these are massive transitions and big moments that can alter our lives.
At the same time, we don’t always have the best tools to tackle everyday life. Those we relegate to auto-pilot mode.
Big moments have their place in our lives but we can get so consumed by them that we sometimes tend to forget that at some point, life goes back to normal.
Learning to bridge moon-landings with walking on earth is something we can all get better at.
