A favorite story of ours is about the original Olympic Games, in Ancient Greece.
If you won an event, unlike today, you didn’t get a fancy gold medal, or a sponsorship with Nike, or a multimillion-dollar TV deal with ESPN.
Nope. They gave you a laurel wreath. A small crown made out of commonly available bay leaves. Worth about thirty cents on the open market, and after about a week you had to throw it out as it started to wither.
I.e. a fleeting object, not worth very much in the grand scheme of things.
This was a metaphor for the fleeting nature of victory.
In other words, those red carpet moments, those moments on top of the podium, look great for the camera, in reality, they don’t last very long. You’re better off worrying about something more substantial.
As Philip Larkin said, “What will survive of us is love.” Exactly.
