It’s not often that athletes are still active, let alone still dominant, while receiving their flowers. Let us now praise the NBA’s newly minted scoring king
There are numerous factors to what makes it so very difficult, as human beings, to appreciate that which is special in real time. For starters, valuing the finite nature of anything brings into sharper focus our own finiteness, the fleetingness of our own existence, and for obvious reasons, that’s something we’d generally rather not dwell upon. Beyond that, life passes by at a frenetic pace, and most days are spent just trying to weather the chaos. Most special, resonant, or important people or events, for that reason, are more easily appreciated in retrospect: at a healthy distance, the rose-colored glass of the rear-view mirror highlighting everything that was once muddled by the chaos of life and made harder to see at the time.
But it’s a worthy exercise in mindfulness, perhaps, to try to take stock of that which is here now. Such an opportunity arises this week after LeBron James, who many with knowledge argue is the greatest player of all time, broke a record that was long believed to be unbreakable: passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the league’s all-time leading scorer.