Friday, July 13, 2007
Big Things
What is a Big thing?
I spoke (quite a while ago now, but just a few posts ago) about Everest's and Kosciusko's, about doing small things as a way of preparation for big things. About the way we all yearn for a big thing.
Recently I was having a discussion with my sister and I came to the conclusion that what I had said was not quite right. Oh don't get me wrong, it was right as far as it went, but it presupposed something that I no longer hold to be true. It presupposed that everyone will have one (or maybe multiple) Everest's, “Big things”. That they need them.
I think its not unusual or uncommon for people to desire one “big thing”, something to set as their goal in life, something of import. I think its something popular culture pushes us towards. All the TV we watch, any book we read, any story we hear, its always about someone exceptional. We all yearn to be them, because they are the default, the standard that any fictional character must live up to in order to be interesting. And invariably, they have a big thing.
Just to give one example I really like of this, we look at Roger, from Rent
I'm Writing One Great Song Before I ...
One Song
Glory
One Song
Before I Go
Glory
One Song To Leave Behind
Find One Song
One Last Refrain
Glory
From The Pretty Boy Front Man
Who Wasted Opportunity
One Song
He Had The World At His Feet
Glory
In The Eyes Of A Young Girl
A Young Girl
Find Glory
Beyond The Cheap Colored Lights
One Song
Before The Sun Sets
Glory - On Another Empty Life
Time Flies - Time Dies
Glory - One Blaze Of Glory
One Blaze Of Glory - Glory
Find
Glory
in a song that rings true
truth like a blazing fire
an eternal flame
Find
One Song
A Song About Love
Glory
From The Soul Of A Young Man
A Young Man
Find
The One Song
Before The Virus Takes Hold
Glory
Like A Sunset
One Song
To Redeem This Empty Life
Time Flies
And Then - No Need To Endure Anymore
Time Dies
Roger has AIDS, and does not know how long he has to live, but he has decided that his Everest is to write a “great song”. But he just cant do it. This song will Redeem his entire life. It will make up for all the bad he has done, it will make him complete. He is stagnating, not moving forward as he invests his everything into finding this song, unable to move forward at all, to improve his life, because he cannot complete his one big thing.
To take an example from “real life” I have had a few friends who were so obsessed with the idea of having a girlfriend, so in love with the concept, that they had put onto that all the other things in their lives. They would feel valued when they had a girlfriend to value them. They would have all the smaller things, all the little improvements in their lives that they needed when they had the big thing. The girlfriend. So many of the small things, the things they were sure the girlfriend would give them, were thing they could have fixed in their own lives themselves. Minor things, but that they had convinced themselves could only come through the girlfriend. And so their lives stagnated. Unable to move forward. Unable to improve. Because they did not have their one big thing. Their Everest.
This desire is unreasonable, because there is no way in the world that we will ever all be exceptional. Beyond that, I think about the exceptional people, and I wonder. Would Einstein have considered his theory of relativity to be exceptional? Would it have been his Everest? Or would he have thought of it is a Kosciusko? I suspect the later.
Maybe the way we should be looking at life is this. Unless we have one now, there are no Everest's. If one shows up, we should climb it when it comes, but if we never have an Everest, does this devalue our life? Does this make us less? Certainly Not. We can improve ourselves, we can conquer our Kosciusko's, and keep moving forward, keep improving, and when the Everest's do come, we will look at them as molehills. They wont be the big things they were when we saw them on the horizon.
