All journeys end at home.

Brett Favre is an expiring star. He’s also an eternal beacon. After three consecutive farewell seasons, the Packer-turned-Jet-turned-Viking is mulling another revision to his career’s last chapter—which would be more worrisome news if his career’s thesis statement weren’t already etched in stone.

Prestige is a publicly traded commodity.

Personhood, on the other hand, is a privately held asset.

I’m not suggesting that Favre’s exit strategy has been especially elegant. There’s a fine line between adult anguish and adolescent angst, and Brett’s annual dithering is fraught with an air of juvenile melodrama. But let’s cut slack where it’s due. In a league where the best players are those with the biggest hearts, it’s only natural that a legendary gunslinger would have trouble corralling his emotions at the end of the fight.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Truth is in the soul of the beheld.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from Favre’s example, it’s simply that being honored by one’s peers is far less important than being honest with oneself.

Sports nerds like to think that jocks play the game to please the crowd. Fantasy drafts, fanatical debates, fatuous diatribes from fatheaded diehards—they’re egomaniacal pastimes, premised on the supposition that athletes exist primarily for our entertainment. The irony, though, is that the competitors on the field are just as vain as the rivals in the stands. Solipsistic pundits will argue that Favre ought to be defined by the judgment they pass upon him. I’d counter that a true solipsist isn’t bound by the opinion of any mind but his own.

Esteem is good.

Integrity is better.

Favre’s indecisiveness may have cost him the respect of his critics, but at least he can still count on the approval of his conscience. 

Inheritance is an act of will. Today we choose the deeds we’ll do tomorrow; tomorrow we'll be the deeds we’ve done today. Brett Favre’s self-centered legacy is that which he’s in the process of bequeathing to his self-centered self, by the sweat of his self-centered brow and for the sake of his self-centered head. Every grizzled veteran longs for the vigor of his youth. The one who retires on his own terms may yet learn to live with the wisdom of his old age.

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T.S. Eliot never made the trip from Kiln to Green Bay to East Rutherford to Minneapolis, but he did know a thing or two about circuitous personal quests:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Which is a fitting ode to a wandering hero.

Because the most meaningful crusades are those we make inside our skulls, and any analyst who tells another man that he ought to stop walking is either looking at Brett's ankle X-rays or only just saying, is all...