I used to tell Aaron life isn't always fair, but it can be good. Can I live it? And live with it?

I wanted him to win.

No.  Not the guy in the picture above.  

I mean the man that Japhia and I have been reading about.  Dion McLean, who lived and then wrote the story of Gobi, the dog that changed his life.

I wanted him to win the five-day, 155-mile ultra-marathon that he was running with a hundred others across the Gobi Desert in heat as high as 135 degrees.  He had suffered so much already in his life and in the course of this race, that I didn't want him to have to interrupt his own race on day four, to take precious time and energy to save the life of a runner just behind him who, by the way, a day or two before had gone out of his way to sabotage Dion and cause him grief.

But Dion was a better man in running his race than I was in reading about it and wanting him to win at any cost. He stopped and went back to help save the other runner from possibly fatal delirium and heat exhaustion -- a sacrifice that guaranteed him not being able to win.  

And at the end of the day the media gave the other runner more attention and praise for surviving, than they did Dion did for saving him.  None of it seemed fair. 

But Dion knew something about "winning" that I was missing at that point.  He also seemed to know that hanging on to an abstract (and usually self-serving) ideal of "fairness" doesn't hold a candle to the actual practice of goodness for the well-being of another.

I wonder what in me was willing to leave the other runner to his fate?  I am embarrassed to admit the feeling.  But there it was, as I was immersed in the story.  No excuse.  

The need to win can be strong and deeply rooted.  To be number one.  On top.  At the head of the class.  Great -- either again or still. 

And why?  What need does it really meet?

Is that really what makes anyone a winner.  And what helps make the world -- or myself, good for anyone?