The Olympics: From War to Art

It’s easy to see how sport evolved from war. The ancient Greek Olympics were played among warring city-states, while an Olympic truce allowed participants and spectators safe passage.  Instead of fighting and killing each other, let’s just play a game and see who wins.  Sports satisfy our sense of competition and can be done in a friendly way, although often they’re not.  Sometimes emotions run high and the old urge for aggression comes out strong. 

There has been an interesting evolution in the last few Olympics, however.  The viewing public has begun to lose interest in sport as war and turn toward something else.

In sport, the winner is obvious, just as it is in war.  Whoever is strongest, whoever is fastest, whoever scores the most points is automatically declared the winner.   In these kinds of competitions there is need only for referees to make sure the game is played fairly and that close calls are reviewed.

Television now brings the Olympics into living rooms around the world.  And TV executives are very sensitive to what their audiences want to see.  While the Olympics still hosts all kinds of sports, TV prime time concentrates on what is most popular, for obvious reasons.  Ratings are all important.  And this year what audiences most wanted to see were sports like figure skating, snow boarding, and trick skiing.  These sports do have athletic technicalities attached to them, but the winners are not cut and dried.  They have to be decided by judges, and often there is much controversy about the fairness of the judging.  This is because these sports are now morphing into art.

Art is subjective, and judging art is mostly subjective no matter how hard we may try to make it objective, so we need judges.  And we love watching these sports because of the creative components they offer us.  The artistic aspect of figure skating is obvious, but it struck me how much creativity is also inherent in these other new Olympic sports.  Snow boarding is judged on how many new moves a person thinks up and how elegantly he/she executes them.  The same is true in trick skiing.  Even good old-fashioned ski jumping is now judged rather than simply awarded automatically by distance covered.  The winners are determined not only by how far they go, but also by their form, just as in figure skating.

Think about what this says about the evolution of humanity.  While national rivalries still play out on the hockey rink, we are becoming less and less interested in who is the fastest or strongest.  Instead we reward creativity, grace and elegance with our attention.

Attention is energy, and where we direct our attention draws more of the same to us because like energy attracts like energy.  If the 2014 Olympics can be used as a predictor, we are beginning to move away from aggression and conflict in favor of the more creative, elegant and graceful parts of our human nature.  The more we direct our attention to creativity, innovation and grace, the more these elements will be present in our lives. in our culture and in our future.

Hooray!

You can learn more about the energy realm in my book, “It’s All About Energy:  Adventures in Expanded Reality”, found on Amazon, and on my website, www.transformationalexpansion.com.