Few of us can imagine what it would feel like to be as good at anything as Tom Brady is at football — a gift that borders on the divine, as if it were bestowed by God. But I think most of us can imagine what kinds of things he might have been feeling as he made an Instagram post promising not to get emotional and then getting emotional nonetheless.
He might have been thinking about how he’d gone to work for 23 painful, impossible years, building a legacy, setting an example, leaving it all out on the field, winning like nobody had ever won, and also losing, because nobody can win everything all the time. He might have been wondering who he would be now, without all of that. And he might have been thinking about how he’d given everything he had to a vocation, only to reach the end and wonder whether everything was enough or too much.