There was a time that I was really into scuba diving. We went to all kinds of exotic locales: Bonaire, Palau, the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, and so on. I can’t remember them all, but we were always after something like this:
However, if you go in the ocean much, it doesn’t take long to realize that most of it – – in fact, just about all of it – – looks much more like this:
Grey. Featureless. Dull. Boring.
I think this is an apt metaphor for life in general, however. Everything around us with any import can be placed on a bell curve. Restaurants. People. Houses. Websites. A few things are great. A few things are terrible. And most things are there in the middle. The grey stones of life.
The patron saint of Slope, the holy George Carlin, expressed this well when he told us how All Kids Are Special………
You and I are not rocks, of course. Most of us, at least. Even if we do find ourselves surrounded by drabness, most of us have the ability, but perhaps not necessarily the will, to better ourselves and our situation.
To my way of thinking, the two key factors are (1) desire and (2) liberty.
I think we can agree that number 1 is more in control than number 2. Liberty is more a matter of circumstance, comprising attributes such as what country you live in, what your family situation is, what your financial situation is, and other extenuating circumstances which may help or hinder whatever your cause is. Gender. Orientation. Race. Religion. They all play a part.
Desire, however, is more germane to character itself. I would suspect that most of you, like myself, are not burdened by a lack of liberty. The fact that you are taking free time to hang out on a site whose purpose revolves around making outsized returns from financial markets suggests that most of you aren’t hampered by any yoke of oppression. So it really does come down to desire. Will. Fortitude. And a good dose of perseverance.
The mistake I make, I think, is to project my own innate desire onto just about everyone else. In other words, I think one’s effort to improve their circumstance, by whatever definition that might be, isn’t homogeneous across humanity. It’s back to that bell curve again. Most people are truly content to be grey rocks. Or, just as likely, they’re unaware of any other meaningful possibility. Being a little less drab is enough.
It’s easier not to bother. And most people don’t.
You might consider otherwise, though. In the end, none of this matter. Not me. Not you. Not anyone you know. It’s all a matter of scale. You can be the coolest eel, the brightest starfish, or the most radiant coral, and it’s all meaningless in the largest context.
Yet we don’t live in that context. We live moment to moment. And, meaningless or not, the span of one’s life is brief enough to ignore all that and recognize that we might as well scale our perception to what actually gives meaning to our own brief visit here. The result doesn’t even matter.
You want to be “special”? The only meaning is whether you make the effort. For your own sake, and what really counts, that’s the thing of real value.
