In a week that included both Election Day and the World Series finale, many experienced,  in the words of the opening lines of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, “the thrill of victory” while others experienced “the agony of defeat.”   (I put my Phillies cap away next to my Red Sox shirt and wondered if New Jersey’s newly elected governor would really bring all the changes proclaimed in all the commercials and debates.)  This week for me was filled with more personal defeats than victories.   It has been my experience that the agony of defeat is felt more deeply and and lasts much longer than the thrill of victory, that life’s contests are not a zero-sum game with the thrill of the victor equal and opposite to the agony of the defeated.

One of my favorite classes at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business was a course on decision theory taught by Professor Jay Koehler.   In that class I researched “Regret Theory” first proposed by Graham Loomes and Robert Sugden; they  analyzed whether people make decisions based on which decision will cause them to feel the  least regret if their decision turns out to be wrong.  (Of course the paper discusses this in far more scholarly and mathematical elegance than I have supplied here).   At times, I have tried to base my decisions on regret theory, but although the agony of defeat can be crushing at times, I prefer to remember the words of Theodore Roosevelt  “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

It’s far easier to quote words in a blog than it is to live by them, but somehow if they are released into cyberspace,  they become more powerful reminders of the way I want to view my life and its defeats and regrets.

Today is Election Day and I voted shortly after the polls opened at 6:00 AM.    Although it is a gubernatorial race in New Jersey today  there was none of the chaos at the polls that there was a year ago.

Yesterday, when I let my co-workers know that I would be in late because I was voting before work, they said “Is tomorrow election day?”  “Of course,”   I responded, “It’s the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.”   And then I remembered with fondness and sadness that it was my father who had taught me all the rules for the holidays such as election day.   That Thanksgiving was the fourth Thursday in November and was not necessarily the last Thursday in November and that Easter was the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first full day of Spring.   (The latter did not really assist me in determining the date, except to know that it could never be earlier than the first Sunday in Spring and never later than about a month later.)

I felt good after I voted.   Although so many may say that one vote does not make a difference, when I lived in Pasadena, California,  there was an election in which there was an actual tie and there had to be a run-off election.    If I had not voted, the other candidate would have won.   I felt guilty for all the times I neglected to vote in “minor elections”  or elections whose outcomes seemed so obvious that I failed to cast my vote.   That’s worse than not staying to watch the credits at the end of the film you just enjoyed, something which I would never do.