Do you know what’s hard about life?
Everything.
Which is crazy, right? Because, life really isn’t that hard. Life could be so much easier for most of us. It’s like we aren’t even trying. Or maybe we are trying in all the wrong ways and wrong directions.
Or maybe about all the wrong things.
Ego, pride, vanity… the things that keep us focused on ourselves. How awesome I am or should be and you aren’t.
Always trying to impress others with our awesome awesomeness. And whenever this is our goal, it’s almost guaranteed to end in awful.
It’s a tricky line to walk. The line between trying to look good for the sake of narcissism, and looking good simply because taking care of oneself and appearance is healthy physically, mentally, and spiritually. Having the appropriate appearance in a given context is useful for putting people at ease and gaining trust.
Motive matters. Always.
You remember going to banquettes and dances and such in high school, right? You took time look your best and spent money on the pretty flowers or dress or tie or tux. You wanted your date be impressed with you (maybe a little vain?) but also you wanted your date feel like you cared enough to try hard (much more selfless than the other reason).
And this is probably ok because banquettes and proms are nerve racking enough as it is. Put a bunch of growing, changing, socially awkward people in a room and make them have conversation in a setting and context they are not normally accustomed to, and, well, awkward and embarrassing things can happen. To others. Not me that one time (only one?) my junior year.
Ok, ok. Since you asked, I’ll tell you. Don’t say I never did anything for you.
Every year in high school we had a number of scheduled banquettes and formal gatherings. There was a Thanksgiving banquette. The Christmas Banquette. The Valentines banquette. There was also Fall Fest, but that was different. Less tuxedo’s and more over-alls.
This one particular banquette, I was in between girlfriends. Which is not the same as being lonely and pathetic. You can prove nothing.
As such, I was trying to decide what I was going to do. Ask someone randomly or go stag? Run the risk of awkwardness or sit at a table with other dudes, or be the third wheel to some other happy cuddly sickening couple and pretend I wasn’t all sad and lonely. (Wow, that made me sound really pathetic. You can prove nothing.)
I decided to be awesome and brave and chivalrous and ask some equally unattached female to “hang out and be losers together” or some other such romantic words.
So, I asked a girl I was on the gymnastics team with. She was super nice and friendly. A really cool person. She was more on the quiet side, which is totally fine, except I was also a bit on the quiet side. But I figured, it’s only one evening, we will get through it just fine.
And so we did. I put on my finest tie and jacket that I borrowed from someone else, brought the prerequisite single rose and arrived to escort her to the grand shin dig. She looked lovely. Hair beautiful, dress amazing… girls do that whole “cleaning up” thing so much better than we guys do.
Everything was going just fine. We weren’t dating, so there is always that unspoken question of “so… what is actually going to happen here…” but we just kept it friendly, chit chatted, I opened doors and offered my arm for walking and pulled out chairs. I was trying very much to be a gentleman and make sure we both had a great time.
Completely unrelated…
Do you know what I hate? Plastic forks. They do nothing well. Unless you are trying to eat thick mashed potatoes with them (and why would you when a spoon is better), they pretty much just break at the slightest provocation.
Sooo…
We had just finished our main course at the meal and the dessert was served. It was something chocolatey with some strawberry in a sauce on top. As I was delicately and deliberately eating with gentlemanly class like a real man (read: stabbing mindlessly at my dessert), my fork snapped in half. The business end launched itself across the planet to God-knows-where, probably maiming some poor innocent person, and the handle I was still holding slammed down onto the edge of the super classy dessert sized paper plate, flipping it up into the air, causing my entire dessert to launch it’s up into this beautiful arc, and land ever so gracefully sticky side down on my dates dress.
Her look of shock was outshone only by my look of absolute horror. It’s one of those things you can’t really take back, and when the entire table and maybe half the room saw it happen, it’s not something you immediately recover from.
To say that the rest of the evening was a bit awkward is an understatement. She never got mad, but I could tell she wasn’t happy. The tension was so thick you could never have cut it with a plastic fork. Because they break!
I felt so bad. I had really tried. I had tried to be nice and friendly and considerate. I was focussed on her. Which was good. But I wasn’t focussed on what I was doing. Which, as it turned out, was bad.
But I hear you say, “sure, that’s embarrassing, but accidents happen and it’s just part of life.”
Agreed. It’s true. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the wrong thing happens. The truth is, other than being slightly less attentive to my fork than I should have, I really didn’t do anything wrong. Stuff happens, and it just happened to happen to me.
Perhaps that’s the point. Even when you try, you don’t always succeed. Ask any billionaire how they came to be billionaires and they will tell about the couple things they did right, and the hundreds of failures they had to learn from which got them there.
No matter how hard you try to be a better human, to be a more selfless, less vain and egotistical human, there are going to be failures and setbacks. It doesn’t mean we don’t try.
And that’s the flip side. Often, we don’t try because we expect the failure. We know we can’t win them all, and maybe not even most of them, so why bother? It’s so much easier to just float along with the crowd of whatever and not shake up the boat. Why be better and draw the attention of others when you can just blend in to the mediocrity?
It’s easy to do. It doesn’t take much effort to blend in. And most of the time there are few obvious penalties to blending in, even if there are also few obvious benefits.
Why write our own story when we can just cost along and let the story write itself?
Back to high school, there was this one day when a couple of the guys in my class got into this huge argument. It got so bad that they decided they were going to throw down. So they and the crowd around them, me included, all crammed into this one room to watch it happen. A bunch of people standing around watching two kids beat each other bloody.
And we were all hyped up to see an actual fight. Most of us had never actually seen real people get into a fight before. What was that going to be like? Would there be kung-fu goodies? Would it be super lame?
It started with lots of pushing and the occasional jab and clumsy grazing of fist to head or arm or whatever. It was completely lame, but we were all gawking just the same.
As we were standing around just letting it happen, one of our other classmates barged into the room. This guy shoved his way through the onlookers, and got in-between the combatants. He shoved one against the wall with his forearm and held the other one away with a handful of shirt. After he did so, he did something strange. He looked around the room at each one of us. He looked everyone one of us in the eye and asked what was wrong with us? Why did we just let this happen? Why didn’t a single one of us even try to stop it?
I’ve done a lot of embarrassing things in my life. But that moment remains one of my most shameful moments ever. It should have been me to stop that fight. Or any of the other people there. But if not them, it should have been me. I should have tried. I shouldn’t have just followed along like some apathetic zombie. I should have stepped up and tried to make things different.
There is a quote that goes something like this. “All that is need for evil to thrive is for good men (and women) to do nothing.”
The world is what it is because most of us don’t really try. We complain a lot about what it is, and then proceed to do nothing about it. The same is true about ourselves. We complain about our problems and failings and fears, and then proceed to do nothing about it. We just float along doing what we’ve always done, or some variation of it, but ultimate make no real change.
But what if? What if you actually tried? What if you tried a different way?
What if you did something new?
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