Warriors players leave on a charter flight to Tamworth. Photo / Photosport
COMMENT:
This has been the big lockdown dilemma.
Do I pursue these extraordinary times as a chance to see life through different eyes, embrace the opportunity and my good fortune, or feel obliged to take a different course because of the pain being felt by others?
I chose the former, which led to the next dilemma. Should I - on any level - feel guilty about that?
Feeling something isn't going to make it any better for anyone else, although yes, there are twinges.
So here we go.
I've loved the lockdown, and so have many other people I've spoken to. It may have been life changing, in an amazing way. For now I'm not too sure, but it has the potential.
Having spent a lifetime on a treadmill without a stop button, someone pressed a giant stop button.
The conversations about this with others who have embraced lockdown are stilted though. It's like slowly climbing a ladder until you get to a peak where you can be honest, each rung involving feeling each other's position out, and knowing the calamity for other lives.
Some stories are actually heartwarming, like the ones about families coming together, and even rifts being healed or at least bypassed. Forced together for an extended period, we acted differently for survival reasons.
Younger people living in crowded flatting conditions suddenly found themselves in space, their flatmates having found other bubbles, giving them a chance to breathe so to speak. The stories are endless.
Lockdown became an almost spiritual experience of stillness and quietness for me. Days and days went by when I didn't need anything. It was bliss.
The noise of sliding, slamming courier van doors gave sporadic reminders of what the real world is like, what we will all probably return to.
But the break from normality has been a chance to see life differently.
Many people my age (late 50s) were already questioning the values which drive the treadmill, including the ridiculous splurging we do on possessions.
Someone is always trying to sell you something these days. Even Greenpeace is always pursuing more money.
Just a day of peace, just one day, with no demands, no obligations, no commitments, is paradise. Lockdown provided loads of those.
My country said stay home. My company said stay home. Okay then. I stayed home. It was wonderful to the point it turned into a type of spiritual experience.
It was also a revelation.
I didn't miss sport, by which I mean watching sport. Not one little bit. It has been my life, but I'm largely over it.
Sport is only interesting to me now on another level, like the amazing Michael Jordan series produced by ESPN and shown on Netflix here. The Last Dance is as good as sport will ever get.
The subject matter is fascinating - Jordan's personality, his do-or-die competitiveness, is riveting. It's the thing which jumps out from the screen, in almost every second of a 10-part series on his Chicago Bulls basketball revolution.
When you also throw in the natural character of American sports, the unafraid way they engage and deal with conflict on and off the field/court, their general openness, it makes for wonderful viewing.
When the final two episodes of The Last Dance are aired this week, it will leave a huge sense of loss, a big hole in life.
In comparison, New Zealand sport - which I really have little time for anymore - is in permanent lockdown. Okay then. Goodbye.
I'll read about the fabulous Colin Kaepernick and watch Nick Kyrgios perform his stunning trick shots instead.
Kyrgios is the most interesting player, playing wise, since the artistry of John McEnroe, my tennis idol.
Then I'll listen to Naomi Osaka - there was a short but delightful clip of the American/Japanese tennis star who, amongst other things, talked about how pissed off she is about how shy she has been.
Then she revealed her video hook-ups with Venus Williams, whose sister Serena had treated Osaka so badly at a US Open final. But The Last Dance has raised the bar - for now, everything else feels frustratingly truncated.
This column has headed off in a direction not initially intended.
It was to have been about the Warriors. Sorry, but the pain some of their players obviously feel in being separated from families just doesn't strike a real chord with me.
To a degree, the separated-from-family story is forced, because when the media asks - as it continually does - what can the players really say?
But something kept nagging away at my brain. Why do I seem to have no sympathy for their position, or the over-reporting of it?
Possible conclusion: it's generational.
Gratitude is not something which comes naturally to me, but I have always been overwhelmingly delighted that my generation was not sent to war, that war never visited us. I think about this extreme fortune constantly.
I was brought up by a generation which had most definitely experienced war, to such a horrific degree that the men involved never talked about it, and their wives also largely suffered in silence, their horrible experiences relegated to footnotes.
Yet, in retrospect, this silent history shaped many of our lives.
Over the years you pieced it together. I knew people who had been kids during the German blitz on London, who had been lifted off the beaches of Dunkirk, fought in the so-called 'forgotten army' which included being imprisoned by the vicious Japanese, who had experienced the horrors of jungle warfare.
None of them received what you might call professional or group-support help when it was needed. The true pain, including the lifelong loss of wartime comradeship, was private.
This is not how it should have been, but how it was.
To take this down a more moderate track, sports teams - in the first half of the 20th century - often travelled for six months or so, with two of those months being on a boat.
To combine those aspects, when cricket's greatest player Don Bradman arrived with the Australians for an Ashes tour in 1948, he carried 17,000 food parcels for an English nation still facing rationing three years after the war. That's how tough it was back then.
And then it was on with the tour. There was no Skype or Zoom - just each other really, and the postal system.
I make no judgement about the Warriors, and how they feel about their forced camp in Australia. None whatsoever. They are people shaped by a very different environment.
But I just don't feel their pain.
The deal is understood to be one of the biggest sponsorships of female sport in NZ.