There is a sort of irony in the way we approach each day. We have this tendency as humans to chase some impossible, rigid ideal, to wait for every condition to align, all the while allowing the ordinary, yet meaningful moments to pass us by. As Dante Moore sits idle another week following the horrific injury from a cheap shot, this thought struck me: We were watching the ideal and simply not recognizing it in the moment.
Not because Moore was perfect, of course, or because Oregon’s offense had somehow transcended the ordinary difficulties of football. There were missed throws, possessions that stalled somewhere between promise and fulfillment and afternoons when the machinery seemed just slightly out of alignment. We cataloged those imperfections with the peculiar diligence of people convinced that perfection was not only possible but owed to us, as though the distance between what we witnessed and what we imagined rendered the former somehow inadequate. We watched a quarterback move an offense down the field and wondered why he hadn’t done it more elegantly, more efficiently, more convincingly, never considering that the quiet confidence we felt each time he broke the huddle might itself have been something extraordinary.
Then Moore disappeared from the field, and the things we had scarcely noticed became the very things we found ourselves missing. The rhythm of an offense that seemed to understand where it was going, the unspoken confidence that third-and-7 represented an opportunity rather than a gathering storm, the almost imperceptible assurance that someone would recognize what the defense intended before the football was snapped. None of it had seemed remarkable while it was happening because familiarity has a way of making even the exceptional feel ordinary, until absence arrives and begins illuminating everything we failed to see.
We had been watching something good, perhaps something exceptionally good, and spending much of our time wondering when it might become great. There is something painfully familiar about that realization, something that extends far beyond football and into the quieter corners of the lives we are all attempting, with varying degrees of success, to understand.
The Trouble With Tomorrow
In Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Emily Webb is granted an extraordinary and ultimately unbearable opportunity. Having died, she returns to an ordinary day from her childhood, hoping to experience again the familiar rhythms of a life that now exists beyond her reach. What overwhelms her isn’t the discovery of some great tragedy or an overlooked moment of enormous significance, but the almost casual indifference with which the living move through their days, consumed by schedules and obligations, passing one another in kitchens and doorways without recognizing the fragile miracle of simply being together.
Emily watches her family occupy the world she has lost, and the experience becomes intolerable precisely because nothing remarkable is happening. The ordinary movements of living, the conversations that seem unimportant and the small gestures nobody thinks to remember suddenly possess a beauty too enormous to bear. When she asks whether human beings ever truly understand life while they are living it, the Stage Manager offers an answer that remains among the most devastating observations in American literature: “No. The saints and poets, maybe — they do some.”
I’ve returned to that passage many times over the years because it exposes something almost universal about the human condition. We spend so much of our lives mentally inhabiting a future that hasn’t arrived, convinced that happiness is waiting somewhere beyond the next accomplishment, the next improvement or the next problem we finally manage to solve. We imagine that the proper arrangement of circumstances will eventually deliver a kind of permanent contentment, and when we approach that imagined destination, another horizon appears, inviting us to continue postponing our appreciation of the present.
Football fans are particularly susceptible to this arrangement of expectations, perhaps because the sport itself encourages an almost compulsive relationship with what comes next. We celebrate a victory while reviewing the opportunities squandered along the way, admire a remarkable performance while remembering the one throw that should have been completed and begin worrying about the next opponent before the echoes of the previous Saturday have entirely disappeared. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting excellence, and the desire for improvement is part of what makes devotion meaningful, but somewhere along the way we can begin confusing the pursuit of something better with the inability to recognize something good.
Perhaps that is why Moore’s absence has felt so revealing. His injury didn’t transform him into a better quarterback, nor did it erase the legitimate shortcomings that existed when he was healthy. It simply removed the familiar center around which Oregon’s offense had been constructed, exposing all the small, almost invisible contributions we had stopped recognizing because we had come to expect them. The stability that once seemed insufficient suddenly looked remarkable, and the ordinary act of moving the football began to resemble a privilege we hadn’t realized we possessed.
The Things We Ask Them to Carry
The story becomes more complicated, and considerably more human, when we consider what happened after Moore went down. Dylan Raiola inherited an offense that had lost its most important source of continuity, along with the enormous expectations that have followed him since long before he arrived in Eugene. He was asked to provide answers before he had been given much opportunity to understand the questions, stepping into circumstances he hadn’t created and being measured against an ideal whose value had become increasingly apparent only because it was no longer available.
When those answers didn’t arrive immediately, the judgments followed with astonishing speed. For a moment, Brock Thomas became the alternative, offering reassurance and enough competence to suggest that perhaps the solution had been waiting quietly in the background all along. His brief ascendance provided the familiar comfort of believing that uncertainty had finally yielded to clarity, that the necessary adjustment had been made and that the machinery might begin functioning as we remembered it. Then Nebraska happened, Thomas struggled, Raiola returned and the same young man whose earlier performance had inspired uncertainty suddenly became the author of a fourth-quarter comeback, his apparent redemption unfolding over a handful of possessions while thousands of people hurried to reconsider everything they thought they knew.
There is something unsettling about the ease with which we do this, how readily we transform a few minutes of another person’s life into a definitive judgment about who they are. Raiola did not become a fundamentally different human being when he entered against Nebraska, just as Thomas did not suddenly lose the qualities that had made him capable of helping Oregon the previous week. Their circumstances changed, their performances changed and our perceptions followed, sometimes with a certainty the evidence hardly justified. We construct narratives of arrival and failure, redemption and disappointment, attaching enormous meaning to moments that may eventually become little more than small passages in careers whose larger stories remain unwritten.
Robert Frost understood something about this tendency to impose meaning upon events after their consequences become known. In The Road Not Taken, a poem too often reduced to a cheerful celebration of individualism, the narrator imagines himself years into the future, assigning significance to a choice that was far less distinguishable when it was made. The paths were nearly identical, yet memory would eventually transform the decision into a defining moment, a story whose meaning depended as much upon the telling as upon the circumstances themselves. We do something remarkably similar with football players, deciding that one afternoon revealed a destiny or exposed a limitation, even when the passage of time may eventually demonstrate that we were simply watching young people struggle through the ordinary uncertainty of becoming themselves.
And beneath those judgments lies the weight we rarely consider. Moore carries the frustration of waiting for his body to permit what his mind almost certainly longs to do, while Raiola carries the expectations attached to his talent, his name and the opportunity suddenly placed before him. Thomas carries something different but no less human, the strange experience of discovering that an opportunity can arrive unexpectedly, fill a person with possibility and become uncertain again before he has fully understood what it meant. None of these young men asked to become symbols of our hopes and disappointments, yet we place those expectations upon them so naturally that we sometimes forget there are actual people beneath the helmets, each attempting to understand a life that extends well beyond the boundaries of a football field.
The Beautiful Imperfection of Ordinary Things
Mary Oliver once asked, in The Summer Day, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” It is a question so frequently borrowed for graduation speeches and inspirational messages that we sometimes overlook the extraordinary humility of the poem surrounding it. Oliver spends much of her attention contemplating a grasshopper, observing the small and seemingly insignificant movements of a creature most of us would scarcely notice before returning to whatever urgent responsibility had captured our attention. The poem isn’t a demand that we accomplish something magnificent with the time we’ve been given, but an invitation to recognize the magnificence already present in the simple act of paying attention.
I’ve come to believe that this is among the more difficult lessons of adulthood, perhaps because the world seems designed to discourage it. We are forever reaching toward some future arrangement of circumstances in which everything will finally make sense, when the obligations have been satisfied, the uncertainties resolved and the imperfect pieces of our lives assembled into something resembling the picture we carried in our imaginations. Meanwhile, the familiar sound of someone moving through another room, a conversation with an old friend that needn’t accomplish anything and the quiet presence of a dog waiting by the door pass through our days without ceremony, their significance hidden beneath the assumption that there will always be another opportunity to appreciate them.
Sometimes there is another opportunity, of course, and sometimes there are hundreds of them. But the peculiar cruelty of time is that it rarely announces which ordinary moment will eventually become a memory we would give almost anything to recover. We don’t photograph the conversation because nothing important seems to be happening, don’t linger over the afternoon because another one is coming and don’t recognize the familiar voices surrounding us as something fragile because they have always been there. Only afterward, when absence begins rearranging the landscape of our lives, do we discover how much beauty had been concealed inside the things we considered entirely unremarkable.
There is an almost merciless efficiency to the way loss changes our understanding of presence. Something can remain invisible through years of familiarity and become unmistakable the moment it disappears, leaving us searching backward through memories for evidence that we had understood its importance while it was still ours. We remember details that once seemed trivial, hear conversations differently and recognize gestures whose meaning escaped us at the time, sometimes discovering that the life we had regarded as incomplete was already providing nearly everything we needed.
That is the part of Oregon’s season that keeps returning to me, particularly when I remember the offense that existed before Moore’s injury. The Ducks still had problems, still needed better execution and still occasionally wandered through possessions that fell short of their possibilities. Those shortcomings were real, and pretending otherwise would be an exercise in nostalgia rather than understanding. But so was the stability, the confidence and the comfortable expectation that the offense would eventually find its way, qualities that seemed almost unworthy of appreciation precisely because we had grown so accustomed to their presence.
We weren’t wrong to want more from Moore or from the players around him, any more than we are wrong to desire improvement in the people and circumstances that occupy our lives. The mistake was allowing the possibility of something better to obscure the goodness already present, confusing the absence of perfection with the absence of something worth cherishing. We were so busy measuring the distance between what Oregon was and what we imagined it might become that we failed to recognize how much of the journey had already been accomplished.
What We Cannot Hold
T.S. Eliot explored the strange relationship between memory, possibility and time in Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets. The poem moves through a landscape of imagined pathways and moments suspended somewhere between what happened and what might have happened, suggesting that our experience of time is not nearly as orderly as the clocks we use to measure it. The past remains alive in memory, the future occupies our imagination and the present becomes an elusive intersection between what we cannot recover and what we cannot yet possess.
I think about that whenever we become consumed with the need to know what comes next, as though uncertainty itself represents a defect that must be corrected before we can properly appreciate the moment we’re living. We want to know whether Moore will return and restore the offense we remember, whether Raiola’s fourth quarter against Nebraska represents the beginning of something extraordinary and whether Thomas will receive another opportunity to demonstrate that his earlier success was something more than a fleeting exception. We want the future to provide definitive answers because ambiguity makes us uncomfortable, and we imagine that once those answers arrive, the meaning of everything that preceded them will finally become clear.
But life rarely arranges itself into such satisfying conclusions, and the meaning of an experience isn’t necessarily determined by what happens afterward. A good afternoon doesn’t become less valuable because the following one is difficult, just as an unsuccessful performance doesn’t invalidate every achievement that preceded it. A person doesn’t become less worthy of understanding because circumstances reveal limitations we hadn’t previously noticed, nor does a remarkable moment become meaningless simply because it cannot be repeated on demand. Perhaps our greatest mistake is believing that the value of what we have can only be determined after we discover what eventually replaces it.
There is something profoundly human in the desire to recover what has been lost, to revisit the last afternoon before circumstances changed and imagine that, armed with the knowledge we now possess, we might have appreciated it differently. Yet the last good day was never identifiable while it was happening, precisely because we still possessed the luxury of expecting another. We moved through those hours without fear of their disappearance, and that very absence of fear was part of what made them good. To revisit them with the knowledge of what came afterward would necessarily change the experience, replacing the unremarkable comfort of familiarity with the unbearable awareness that it could not last.
Maybe that’s why Emily Webb’s return to the ordinary world in Our Town is so painful. She doesn’t discover that her life was secretly filled with extraordinary events, but that the ordinary events were extraordinary all along, and that the inability to recognize them was inseparable from the innocence of living them. We cannot spend every moment contemplating its eventual disappearance without sacrificing something essential about being alive, yet we might still learn to pay a little more attention before the moment passes.
The Days We Have
I don’t know whether Dante Moore will return next week or whether his recovery will demand more patience than anyone would prefer. I don’t know whether Dylan Raiola’s fourth quarter against Nebraska was the beginning of something remarkable or simply one encouraging afternoon in a career that will contain successes and disappointments we cannot yet imagine. And I don’t know whether Brock Thomas will have another opportunity to remind everyone why Oregon trusted him in the first place, or whether the uncertainty he currently carries will eventually give way to something entirely different from what any of us expect.
What I do know is that each of these young men is living through circumstances that will someday become part of the story he tells about himself, and the meanings he assigns to those experiences may differ considerably from those we’re attaching to them now. Some of the memories will be painful, others rewarding and many will acquire significance only after years have passed, when the urgency of the present has faded enough to reveal what was actually happening beneath the noise. We might do well to remember that before transforming every difficult Saturday into a verdict or every encouraging performance into a promise of things that haven’t yet occurred.
There is an old temptation to imagine that wisdom arrives when we finally learn how to avoid disappointment, when the accumulation of experience grants us some special ability to anticipate loss and arrange our lives to prevent it. I’m no longer convinced that is true, because disappointment remains stubbornly unavoidable and even the things we love most will sometimes fail to become everything we imagined they might be. Perhaps wisdom is something quieter, the gradual recognition that imperfection does not diminish the value of what we possess and that people deserve to be understood within the fullness of their humanity rather than measured exclusively against our expectations.
I think about the Oregon offense we watched before Moore’s injury, when we were still worrying about whether it was good enough, whether the quarterback was making every throw and whether the Ducks were living up to the enormous expectations surrounding them. We watched familiar possessions unfold with a confidence we barely recognized, taking comfort in an offensive rhythm we assumed would continue because we had never been given a compelling reason to imagine otherwise. We were watching something good and asking when it would become better, unaware that the very thing we were treating as insufficient would soon become the standard against which everything else was measured.
And now, with Moore watching from the sideline, Raiola and Thomas navigating their uncertain opportunities and another Saturday approaching, I wonder how much of what we have right now we’re failing to appreciate for the same reasons. Perhaps there are qualities emerging within this imperfect Oregon team that we won’t fully recognize until much later, when the frustrations of the present have softened into memories and the young men we’re so quick to judge have moved into lives and careers far beyond our view. Perhaps the resilience required to survive these difficult weeks, the defensive players learning to carry one another and the friendships being forged through adversity are themselves worthy of appreciation, independent of whether they eventually produce the championship season we imagined.
Because the days we eventually remember most fondly rarely announce themselves as extraordinary when they arrive. They’re simply days, filled with familiar people, ordinary obligations, small frustrations and moments of grace that seem too insignificant to notice, their beauty concealed beneath the comfortable illusion that tomorrow will resemble today. We move through them distracted by everything we haven’t yet accomplished, convinced that the truly meaningful moments are waiting somewhere ahead, until time passes and we discover that much of what we were searching for had been quietly accompanying us all along.
And perhaps that’s the lesson hidden inside this strange Oregon football season, one that extends well beyond the outcome of any particular game or the uncertain futures of three quarterbacks. We needn’t stop wanting more, abandon the pursuit of excellence or pretend that every imperfection deserves celebration, but we might learn to resist making perfection the price of our gratitude. We might recognize that even the unfinished, uncertain and occasionally disappointing moments of our lives contain things we may someday wish we could experience again.
The world will change, as it always does, and the people and circumstances that give our days their familiar shape will eventually change with it. Some will leave, others will arrive and things that once seemed permanent will reveal themselves to have been temporary all along. We cannot prevent those changes, recover every moment we failed to appreciate or guarantee that what comes next will resemble what came before, but we can become more attentive to the fragile beauty of the time we have been given.
We can recognize that the person standing in front of us is more than the expectations we’ve placed upon them, that an ordinary afternoon possesses value independent of whatever tomorrow might bring and that sometimes the very things we’re waiting to become better are already giving us more than we realize. We can learn to hold our ambitions without allowing them to obscure our gratitude, to acknowledge shortcomings without dismissing everything worthwhile around them and to appreciate the imperfect world before us without demanding that it first become something else.
Maybe there was nothing especially remarkable about that last Saturday before Dante Moore was injured, nothing that would have distinguished it from all the other autumn afternoons that have passed through Oregon football history. There were probably plays we wished had worked differently, opportunities we thought had been wasted and familiar conversations about how much better the Ducks might eventually become. We couldn’t have known what was coming, and perhaps even if we had, we wouldn’t have understood how much of what we were watching would soon seem impossible to take for granted.
But I wonder whether the next time something in our lives feels ordinary, we might remember how quickly ordinary things can become precious. Perhaps we’ll linger a little longer, listen a little more carefully or allow ourselves the simple pleasure of appreciating something without immediately considering how it might be improved.
And maybe, if we’re fortunate, we’ll eventually learn to recognize a good day while we’re still living it, rather than waiting for its absence to explain what we had.