How Waiting 108 Years Makes the Good Life

For years, people have been asking me what I will do if the Chicago Cubs ever win the World Series. I don't actually know. The closest I've come to what that moment might be like was when the Cubs won the National League Division Series against the Cardinals in 2015. I was as surprised as anyone when I burst into tears on the spot, overwhelmed by emotion. It was the biggest game at which I had been in the ballpark, caught up not only in my own excitement but in the energy of the crowd, participating in a roar of joy in which I could not distinguish my own voice. Émile Durkheim would call this "collective effervescence," and he would point out that those present had entered a sacred time/space, from which we would return the next morning to our profane lives and realize the everyday bodiliness of them in contrast to the spiritual experience of that moment at the end of the game.