Unseen Beauty: A Journal

The Olympic Dream

Life is made up of stories. Human beings love them, we live them, we listen to them, we believe in them. In our desperate life-long journey to understand and organize the chaos of this world in which we live and move and have our being, stories are the most natural, the most easy way to codify the path of our journey and to see it as part of the greater pattern of existence. Stories touch our hearts; they draw us out of our own world into the milieu of existence; they stay with us when clinical facts and statistics have all been lost.

For me, stories are the greatest form of expression. They change as we grow, but they never leave us. We hear them in our cradles, comforting us, amusing us, easing us into this difficult thing we call life, making promises of what may be in our futures. We hear them on our deathbeds, the warmth of memories brought back into ephemeral reality though the power of story, the promise of hope beyond the dark veil of death, the stories of what was, is, and may yet be that eases us out of the story of life and into an epilogue.

Stories happen, whether we want them to or not, events spinning through a thousand thousand thoughts, dreams, and footsteps each moment. Yet taking the truth of event and spinning it into the wonder of story, as instinctive as it may be, is not always easy. The miracle of creating story is frequently as fascinating as the story itself, a story within a story – the kind of thing that good old Billy Shakespeare loved. The canvas of emotion and experience is already stretched taut before us, but it takes the hand of a true artist to delicately trace the lines and fill them with the colors of drama that pull us out of our own story and allow us to experience something beyond our ken and invest in the tale of another, real or fictional.

That wonder of story is why I have hurried home each night this week and turned on the television. My cable box is typically called upon for an average of ten or twenty hours in a year. I usually prefer film; DVD is the gift of God in my world. However, once every two years, I find myself glued to the television every night. I am well aware that I am in the minority; the Olympics are no longer a major event. The grandiose white hat against black hat drama of the US vs USSR ended with the crumbling of the iron curtain, and most people would prefer reality television like American Idol to reality television like the Olympics.

Yet, even armed with that knowledge, I cannot pull myself away. The tapestry of story is just too rich, and the medium to grand. And, of course, the presentation is everything. Unlike the typical football or baseball game, I do not see the Olympics as being simply about sporting competition. They are about achievement, about faith, and about one shining moment in a life that can never be repeated or redeemed. In a few seconds, we catch a glimpse, in word and deed, of struggle, of pain, and of victory. With a few deft brush strokes, a story begins, and we, as viewers, bring its finer details of emotion and empathy from our own plotlines.

Set against the driving complications of escalating competition, the beauty of athleticism plays out, yet it is the insights into the lives behind the beauty that makes the entire event so addictive to me. Far from the soggy melodrama of my workplace, where the primary tale of the day may well be who insulted whom during class or whose boyfriend has been caught sleeping with his new drinking partner, the Olympics offer the promise of something greater, something cleaner, something more. They are neither contrived to create story nor are the individuals participating in them merely engaging in less than scrupulous activities in order to attract the attention of a camera. The stories that play out on the screen, woven into a gestamkunstwerk of picture, sound, and story through the magic of television editing, are tiny miracles, bits of wonder which give hope, which inspire, which draw us out of our own story for a moment and whisper what stories our lives might be able to tell, if only. And I sit on my couch, indulging in the wonder of story, believing, in the glow of the screen, that effort and courage do inspire, do change the course of the story, the course of life, the course of the world.