Sporting Road

A few of our favorite artists from this year's show.

Ralph Lauren’s personal style is one of the more interesting examples of a designer essentially living inside his own mythology. He rarely dresses like someone trying to demonstrate that he is fashionable. Instead, he has spent decades refining a very specific American ideal: wealthy without being flashy, athletic without looking like he just left the gym, and traditional without appearing trapped in the past. His wardrobe tends to revolve around a handful of dependable pieces, timeless classics: tailored navy and charcoal suits, white and blue dress shirts, Oxford shirts, chinos, denim, Shetland and cashmere sweaters, suede loafers, leather boots and beautifully made outerwear. He is particularly fond of classic American sportswear, but he mixes it with British tailoring and the occasional Western reference. A denim shirt might appear beneath a tailored jacket; a tuxedo might be worn with a deliberately informal attitude; a cable-knit sweater might sit over a button-down and tie. What makes Lauren distinctive is his ability to make expensive clothes look lived in. He is not particularly interested in the pristine, highly coordinated look that often comes with luxury dressing. His clothes have texture and character: worn denim, corduroy, tweed, suede, leather, flannel and weathered boots. Even when the clothing is exceptionally expensive, the effect is relaxed. It suggests that the wearer has owned the jacket for years rather than having had it delivered yesterday by a personal stylist. (In fact, many of the Polo Ralph Lauren photo shoots purposely patina (or age and wrinkle) the wardrobes for the shoots before the model ever puts them on, and U.S. Polo Assn. clothing also followed suit.) There is also a strong element of the American West in his personal wardrobe. Lauren has

I was reading this message from The Secret about envisioning today as the best day of your life.   Byrnes writes: When you woke up this morning, what kind of day were you expecting? Did it just seem like another day to you, or were you expecting that today would be the best day of your life? The truth is, today is the best day of your life, because you’re here now living it. Yesterday has disappeared into the sunset, and tomorrow never comes. Today is always the best day of your life! Let’s try to never take today for granted. Instead, at the beginning of the day, when you first wake up, take a few minutes to mentally expect that today will be great, today will be amazing, today will be full of joy - today will be your best day ever. Let’s expect that things we’ve been thinking about all work out perfectly today. Let’s expect to feel good. To feel love and gratitude. To smile and laugh a lot. Let’s expect there to be miracles today. And let’s expect the Universe to delight us today. That sounds like a perfect day to me. What do you think? Let’s do it, every day. It becomes more than a habit. It becomes a mindset, part of your lifestyle, and eventually, you realize you have no desire to step off the carousel.

Teddy Roosevelt had a great style for adventurers to adopt, both in terms of his fashion as well as his exploits. Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was a lifelong equestrian, cowboy, and military commander of the [Rough Riders](https://www.nps.gov/thrb/learn/historyculture/tr-rr-spanamwar.htm) whose passion for horseback riding defined his personal philosophy and rugged public image. After personal tragedy, Roosevelt fled to the Dakota Badlands where he learned to ride hard, rope cattle, and live as a frontier ranchman, transforming his health and grit. As lieutenant colonel of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, he famously led parts of the advance on Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill, riding his horse Little Texas into the campaign. An avid horseman, Roosevelt routinely rode through Rock Creek Park and Potomac Park with aides, famously declaring when offered an early car that "The Roosevelts are horse people." To prove his military physical fitness standards were realistic, President Roosevelt rode 98–104 miles on horseback from Washington, D.C., to Warrenton, Virginia, and back in a single day through freezing weather. His most famous personal mounts included a spirited hunter named Bleistein and his trusted cavalry horse Little Texas. In his own words.... from https://www.nps.gov/thrb/learn/historyculture/tr-rr-spanamwar.htm Who were the Rough Riders? Excerpts taken from the The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt "Secretary Alger offered me the command of one of these regiments. If I had taken it, being entirely inexperienced in military work, I should not have known how to get it equipped most rapidly, for I should have spent valuable weeks in learning its needs, with the result that I should have missed the Santiago campaign, and might not even have had the consolation prize of going to Porto Rico. Fortunately, I was wise enough to tell the

Changing someone’s mind is rarely about proving that you are right. In fact, the harder you try to convince someone that they are wrong, the more likely they are to dig in. Human beings have an inconvenient attachment to their own ideas. Once a belief becomes part of how we understand ourselves, challenging it can feel less like correcting an opinion and more like attacking the person who holds it. One of the most revealing examples of this phenomenon comes from a bizarre episode in the 1950s. A Chicago woman named Marian Keech claimed to have received messages from extraterrestrial beings warning that the world would be destroyed by a catastrophic flood on December 21, 1954. A small group of followers, known as the Seekers, believed her. Some abandoned their jobs, gave away possessions and separated themselves from their families in preparation for the end of the world. Three psychologists, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, infiltrated the group to observe what would happen when the prophecy failed. Then December 21 arrived. Nothing happened. There was no flood. The world continued its thoroughly unimpressive habit of existing. You might expect the group to admit that they had been wrong. Instead, something much more interesting happened. Keech announced that the group’s faith had been so powerful that God had decided to spare the Earth. The failed prophecy did not destroy the belief. It strengthened it. The psychologists were witnessing what Festinger would later describe as cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable tension that occurs when reality conflicts with something we strongly believe. The Seekers had invested too much in their prediction. They had sacrificed possessions, relationships and reputations. Admitting they were wrong would not simply mean changing

Friedrich Nietzsche posed one of philosophy’s most unsettling questions: If you had to live your life over and over again, exactly as you have lived it, would you embrace it? Imagine that a demon appears and tells you that your entire life will repeat itself infinitely. Not just the highlights, but everything. Every triumph and disappointment. Every great love and painful loss. Every mistake you wish you could erase. Every ordinary morning, tedious afternoon, and meaningless hour spent doing something you never really wanted to do. Nothing changes. The sequence remains exactly the same, forever. Nietzsche called the idea eternal recurrence. It was less a prediction about the universe than a test of how we are living. The thought is uncomfortable because it strips away the fantasy that someday we will finally get around to living the life we actually want. There is no later. There is only this life, this day, this collection of choices. That leads to a much more interesting question than whether you are happy. Would you want to do it all again? Nietzsche had another phrase for the attitude he believed we should cultivate: amor fati, the love of fate. It means more than simply accepting whatever happens. It is the willingness to embrace your life as a whole, including the parts you would never have chosen for yourself. The failures, losses, disappointments, wrong turns and embarrassments become part of the story rather than evidence that the story went wrong. Applied to ordinary life, the idea becomes remarkably practical. Look at your daily routine. How much of it would you willingly repeat forever? How much of your time goes toward things that actually matter to you, and how much