Well, three weeks from tomorrow the election will be over. I’ve kept a line between writing about my take on the candidates and writing about happiness and intentionality, so go to the P&P page for the first.
My point in this post is a more general application about the election, or indeed any contest: often the real work begins after the excitement is over.
In fact, as I’ve thought about this (very deep) subject, it has occurred to me that contests fall into two categories: those that end with the declaration of the victory and those that give the victor a job. In other words, there’s a difference between contests that are an end in themselves and those that simply open the door to an opportunity. Can you imagine being one of the two major presidential candidates? First you’ve had to hack and plunge your way through the primary season, only to then start the general election campaign. Weeks and weeks of complete and total stress. People screaming at you. Bad food. And then, finally, election day arrives. If you win, do you get a great big bouquet and a chance to go lie by the pool? No! Your reward is to take all the stress, late nights, unrelenting media scrutiny, stress, weight of the world, etc., etc., times ten. It’s incredible that anyone wants the job.
Actually being the President: think of the meetings, and the plane trips, and the dinners, and briefings, and the all-consuming crises, and the sniping from both sides of the aisle. There must be times when the inhabitant of the White House lies awake at 3:00 AM and thinks, “Why on earth did I get myself into this?”
And even when the contest or event is an end point, life goes on after you win the Super Bowl. You can’t spend the rest of your life admiring your ring. I was a fine arts major in college and so was around lots of people who had to give senior recitals. You’d work and work, practice and practice, strain every nerve, and then . . . it would be over. Everyone would clap, you’d have a party afterwards, and then you’d go home. And the next morning you’d get up and realize, “I don’t have a recital to practice for!” For some of us it was a huge relief. For others it was a downer. But for all of us it was a challenge: where do I go from here?
(Funny story about my own recital week when I was a senior: I was so stressed and absent-minded that when I pulled up to the school entryway in my roommate’s car to get some campus passes I couldn’t process why the key was stuck in the ignition, so I just turned the car off and hopped out, at which point it slid backward and hit the edge of the guardhouse, because I hadn’t put it in park. If I hadn’t been at an angle, the car would just have slid out into the highway running in front of the campus. As it was, I ended up doing several hundred dollars’ worth of damage, but it could have been much, much worse. The stuff of nightmares!)
Do you have a big event looming? How will you handle the aftermath?