Super Stars Wanting More?

Why would Super Bowl star quarterback Tom Brady have to cheat? And then lie about it? The media, as you probably know, is referring to the incident as “deflategate.” (I find myself wondering when—please sometime—the media will move on to some other, perhaps more original, words to describe these debacles.)

“I have no knowledge of any wrong doing,” Brady told reporters. But then he refused to reveal his emails and, unfortunately for him, the guys in the locker room who were pumping the footballs—or not--shared theirs. According to sports reporter, Bob Costas, Brady “knowingly broke an established rule.”

I’m not a football fan and even I know who Tom Brady is. Even I know what an amazing quarterback the Patriots have.

Not for the first time, I am staggered by the question of how much is enough?  How much fame, how much money, and how much adulation are enough for any human being?

Look at my favorite newscaster, Brian Williams. What happened to him; what internal shifting occurred to provoke him into enlarging the dramas of his stories? I wish we could say it was some concussion he sustained when he was playing high school football, anything but what appears to be a stunning unconscious need for more.

It’s difficult to sympathize with the rich and famous. It’s so hard for us to imagine the power of addiction to fame and fortune. We don’t live in those realms.

 I have been trying all day to feel into their experience, to find something in myself akin to what conceivably drives that kind of behavior besides the normal attention deficit that accompanies most of us into adulthood.  

I know this: that as I watch the stats which tell me the number of readers of this blog, for example, I am cheered by accelerating numbers and sorry when a blog I write doesn’t “hit”. And, by the way, I never know which will appeal and which will not. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern that I can discern.

So I am asking myself: how many readers are enough for you, Cecily? How much attention do you wish for?  At the same time that I am exceedingly grateful for all of you who do read it, the truth is, I’d love a million people to want to read what I write. I know that isn’t going to happen, but the wish is there. To that miniscule extent I can understand Brady and Williams wanting more: The force of wanting becoming a separate thing from the pleasure of already having.

 Having said that, I still can’t help wondering: so much more and lying for it? And yet, how many of us expand a story we are telling friends in order to wring the maximum drama and attention out of it. We don’t call that lying exactly, do we? We call it exaggerating. I know a couple of people for whom exaggerating in order to gain attention is a chronic condition. I bet you do, too.

This human need for more attention, success, admiration, fame, fortune—whatever floats your boat---belongs to all of us in differing degrees and in different areas of our lives. Mostly we try to be discreet about it. Facebook is a common and socially acceptable attention grabber. Otherwise we hide our need; cover it with some costume, like humility or manipulation. Better to come right out with whatever success/admiration we seek and own it, at least to ourselves. That way it won’t sneak up on us and catch us unprepared for what can be its destructive power.

It’s just so unfathomable, so much larger than ordinary life when hugely successful and talented Tom Brady or Brian Williams are caught wanting more. Their failure of self-control stands out and we get to point the fingers of self-righteousness at them while ignoring our own, albeit less conspicuous, self-seeking.

Instead of serving our outrage, who could these two men be for us? We could regard them with, in Buddhist writer, Pema Chodron’s, words, “friendly curiosity.” We could view their actions as lessons in life: no more, no less.