What’s the antonym for egoism? This isn’t a trick. Do you know it? I’ll tell you in a minute if you don’t.
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After the game finished, I hung back for a minute just to get a look at the faces of the people leaving the arena. It was not surprisingly an assorted grab bag of people all shape, size, and age.
Most were wearing blue and seemed happy to the point of delirium. I just smiled, texted my friends, drank my beer, and watched. People always use fluffy words like unity in connection to the community when local sports teams achieve some degree of greatness. I’ve been around great sports teams before but I never really gave a shit about the whole unity idea until last night.
When I got to my seat yesterday, the person next to me was some 50-year-old dude and he was holding a 12-ounce plastic cup of beer with a slice of fruit bobbing on the surface. That sorta pissed me off. I thought, mother-fucker, you’re at a god-damn hockey game. Get a real beer and get a big one while you’re at it. He and his wife, presumably, were late getting back to their seats after both intermissions too. Not just a little late, they missed over 5-minutes of game-time. That’s simply ridiculous.
But when the game was over, we shared an exuberant high-five. The type of person I perceived him to be, his actions that register as grave offenses in my book, all the assumptions I had made about him and his personality — I forgave all of that. Who cares? The Sabres won. Are my standards for people so high that I’m unable to look past these internal triggers I have for douchebaggery after having witnessed greatness? He might not even be a douche-bag. I just can’t say for sure.
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I’m not a religious person but I can speak about all the Abrahamic religions without embarrassing myself. Honestly, religion fascinates me as a person that cares deeply about the initiatives that put social change into motion. Religion is certainly a mechanism for that.
Perhaps the most widely recognizable passage in the Bible is Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. You hear this in weddings all the time. Love is patient. Love is kind. A lot of people don’t know this but Paul wasn’t talking about the romantic love that’s intimately shared between two people. He was talking about Caritas. In English this is most often translated to mean charity, not so much in the giving sense but in the inherent love that Christians expect each person to have for others, particularly and especially for complete strangers.
This idea is hardly only that of the Christians. I’ve already digressed far enough though and this is starting to sound too academic. I bring up Caritas now because as people walked past me last night, I couldn’t help thinking, what else has the power to make me feel this way? I felt willing and gladly would have talked, drank, or laughed with any one of them but I don’t wake up everyday feeling that way.
Most people think with their own self interest in mind first and foremost. We have a label for this excessive preoccupation with ones self; it’s called egotism. The opposite of that: altruism. Think how often you hear or read each of those words in today’s language. I’m guessing one you’re quite familiar with; the other, not so much.
I think hockey lends itself to this idea that sports causes us to think more selflessly, socially, and with greater symmetry to Caritas than we otherwise do and does so better than any other sport. As hockey fans we approve or disprove of the actions of players just like any other sport but those are just reactions. Before the action occurs, we just hope. We don’t have expectations like if the Bills don’t run the ball up the god-damn middle I’m going to puke on this coffee table or if ‘Cuse doesn’t start storming the glass like beaches of fucking Normandy I’m going to donkey punch whoever is closest to me. In hockey you’re left to think things like c’mon, don’t let them score. Come on! Get it out!
You just hope. And you hope. And you hope. You cheer when the team wearing the blue sweaters does something great and you groan when the other team gets the better of them. You do it together and the connection that’s formed between those experiencing the same emotional roller coaster is real. Nothing gets in the way of that, not age, not gender, not even fruit floating in a southern lager.