Spoiler Alerts

I like to watch baseball games after they happen. It’s so great to skip the commercials during pitching changes and half-inning swaps. So, I’ve had to tell certain members of my family not to text me when the Texas Rangers are playing. (You know who you are!) “Spoiler-Alert” I always snap back.

I’m too cheap to buy UFC fights on pay-per-view. So, I do my best to avoid spoilers until I can watch them for free. ?Which is difficult when it’s a big-name fighter, or a dramatic finish, because I do like to read the news. And it seems that the interweb knows enough about me to want to spoil just about everything I’ve shown the slightest interest in.

Many things don’t rate watching once spoiled. I still haven’t seen the movie Titanic. I don’t generally watch a show I’ve seen before or re-read many books. Sporting events are almost never worth sitting through when you know the final score. ?

The experience is so much better when you don’t know the ending.

And yet there are so many notable exceptions.

I listened to the unabridged audio book of Les Misérables during a round trip drive from Salt Lake City to Olympia one winter. And I’ve seen the play at least 4 times, and several of the movies more than once. The story moves me every single time, and I generally am not a fan of musicals.

I know nearly every line in most of the Marvel movies (especially Ragnar?k). But I can’t even walk through a room where it’s playing without ending up on the sofa enthralled, quoting lines, and laughing too loudly.

?I’ve watched (UFC fighter) Conor McGregor get knocked-out at least 7 times (not even counting the part where I rewind and pause on his sad, defeated face). And I will probably watch it again now that it’s front of mind.

Spoiler-alerts are supposed to guard our enjoyment of a thing, by ensuring we get to experience the discovery of it first-hand. And that’s a good thing. But it’s in the exceptions we can see what's important to us, perhaps even who we are.

And so it is with our very lives. If you’ve been on this rock enough winters, you already know about the dirt-nap waiting for you at the end. (Sorry, forgot to say ‘spoiler-alert’).

But it isn’t when or even how we meet our end that define us. It’s where we put the time we have. The end is never the payoff when you know it already. The hero's journey is about the experiences, the lessons, the laughter, the struggles, the triumph and failures.

Here are some of the lessons I've bookmarked so far:

• Time is not a renewable resource.
• Love people today on this side of the ground.
• Laugh at myself and the ridiculousness all around me.
• The need to be right is an albatross.
• Who I am is defined by relationships, not things.
• Seasons are temporary. Good or bad, this too shall pass.
• Thinking about what I cannot do has a high opportunity cost.

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