Karsten,
Yesterday, I had a long conversation with someone I knew not well but came to know in the conversation. Eventually. Probably much like you with your classmates in the Sports Product Management Program. It began concrete enough that I could be helpful and focused on technical educational science stuff. Probably like your product management courses and the discussions you had with your classmates. The letters from them have been poignant in your work together. In teams. With dreams of a product. A career. Together with a plan but backed by a dream.
But the deeper conversation yesterday drifted to why. What is this all about? What happens with interruptions? Unplanned events that take the course of life unevenly forward with backward drifts. Dreams gone adrift. Edges that alter the dream with interruptions and are disruptive of time. Questions of movement forward replaced by questions that look backward and question the dream. Back to the beginning? How far back? Yesterday. How many back? What would make it different if re-done. What’s done? So if you can’t re-do, what do you do? Conundrums beyond compare. Your death is exactly that. Life interrupted. Dreams gone adrift. No flow. No more. Just drift. The dream interrupted by an unanticipated death. So what happens then? The dream now gone? Start over? New dreams to be the anchor of planning and moving forward.
Your dream was all about sports and athletics. Your program was/is about sports. Athletes. Everyone in the program and in fields of play have dreams. It’s contagious: that hope. One day…Eventually. So, dreams need their place as an anchor but can shift. Why would that be a problem? Keep the dream. Shift the dream. Let the dreams shift slowly but steadily. Not drift away.
For us, our life is to honor the dream of you and Sev being here for a reason. Move forward with both of you, but now, differently. We want to keep your dream, now not possible with you not in the game. So it’s others who are in the game that we need to fulfill your dream. Sports and athletics. Your classmates. One day, we will meet them again and again through your scholarship. The next generation moving forward. With dreams. Dreaming not adrift. Pulling up with interruptions but not stopping. Being in the game. Keeping the dream with a shift.
The conversation yesterday was complicated but needed to be. To focus on the present. Meet the day on its own terms. Get done what needed to be and then move forward with the dream intact. Not drifting away but shifting. It’s all we have with everything else made up. The past reinterpreted. The future interrupted. The edges are always present, so what? Keep the dream.
We love you buddy and will keep you in our dreams. Your dream.
Dad