The madness is upon us again in college basketball tournament season. But WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, wonders if it’s worth looking at our brackets a different way.
It is March, the month of brackets.
The NCAA men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments are both in full swing. If you had trouble getting ahold of some of your friends over the weekend, it’s likely they were holed up in a sports bar somewhere, cheering for a college they’d never heard of until five minutes ago because that school had a chance to pull off an upset.
One of the reasons the tournaments capture our imagination so thoroughly is the magic of the bracket. Each tournament whittles down 68 teams, round by round, until there is only one. A bracket is orderly. It looks like a formation of geese, built for efficiency. The games themselves are full of drama and chaos, but the tournament proceeds like a math equation, slowly narrowing to the tip.
A bracket is so satisfying that we plug all kinds of other things into one, especially in March. Garden & Gun magazine has a bracket of the South’s best steakhouses. Somebody on Reddit posted a bracket of movie directors. That first-round matchup of Spike Lee v. Michael Bay is a DOOZY.
There’s just one problem I have with these NCAA-style brackets. You end up with only one winner. With 68 teams in the basketball tournament, to get to the end, 67 teams have to lose.
I find myself craving a different kind of bracket. Maybe one that’s vertical instead of horizontal. More like a family tree.
Family trees are like a tournament bracket in reverse. They start with one or two people and grow branches as each generation begets the next. They grow into funny shapes as a couple over here has eight kids and another couple over there has none. They’re logical but also unpredictable.
I sort of think of kindnesses in the same way.
If you do something nice for someone else, that person might visit a kindness to one or two other people. And then those people might pay it forward in some way. I like to think of kindness as a bracket that grows and regenerates with each passing act, until there are so many you could never fit them all on a page.
But here’s the thing about that kind of bracket: It’s mostly invisible. You might never see how your kindness led someone else to act the same way. You just have to trust that the bracket keeps growing, out of your sight.
I don’t have to tell you that kindness is more important than ever in these times. So is faith — not just the religious kind, if you believe, but faith in your fellow humans. An act of kindness is not just meaningful in and of itself. It’s an investment in humanity — something that we hope and believe will accrue interest and pay off down the road.
Your tournament brackets might be busted already — mine usually are by this stage. But this is the other good thing about a bracket of kindness. It never needs to end.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
