You Are More
I received good news recently regarding an exam that I took in an effort to advance my career/claw my way up to the glory of middle management. I studied for months. I brain-dumped dissertations to my microwave screen (it’s a face level to make it extra awkward). I read a substantial amount of terribly dry material, often more than once, starting with a book on the exam process, which I probably only needed to read one chapter of. I made many flash cards. I listened to the same three YouTube videos at least a hundred times. I worked with a group of three other candidates, each of them competent, knowledgeable, experienced and all-around good people.
The two testing days were of course stressful, though, I felt like I had prepared to the best of my ability, or at least somewhere in the ballpark thereof. In the end, said preparations worked in my favor. Consequently, there’s a chance I could wind up promoting into a better paycheck and out of my right to transfer and seniority, serving at the will of the Head Honcho.
Though excited to receive the good news this week, it was tempered by the fact that some other people, all peers who I respect and many who I call friends, did not do as well as they had hoped. Perhaps they weren’t as well prepared as they should have been. Or, their preparations might have been far superior to mine and they just had an off day when it came down to it. They didn’t win the big game. “Better luck next time,” and all that we tend to say. Insufficient consolation, for sure.
Most all of us have competed and lost. Most of us have tried and failed. Sometimes this was through our own faults and sometimes just fate’s random intervention beyond our control, like an oil slick in an auto race. Most of us also know that failure is said to be the superior teacher to success - if one remains open to the lesson and isn’t defined by the loss. Again, hard to hear when one is still raw.
But succeed, fail or surf the uncertainty of being somewhere on the border… you are more.
You are more than your victories and defeats. You are more than the opinion of others and even the opinion of yourself. You are more than your mistakes and righteous actions. You are more than your fear and courage. You are more than your attributes and afflictions. You are more than your faith and your uncertainty. You are more than the days when you cannot stand the thought of getting out of bed and more than the motivated times when you carpe the ol’ diem. You are more than your ambition and apathy. You are more than your job. You are more than your art. You are more than your bank balance. You are more than your genetics, your carbon façade.
You are more than who you see in the reflection off the microwave’s glass.
We cannot be scientifically certain as to the meaning of the existence of life on this spaceship hurling around the sun, year after year. We can only speculate. I for one believe that the fact we and our fellow travelers, from lichen to Great Ape, are here swimming in this ocean of chaos, is to experience, explore, endeavor, endure, and embrace. There are twenty-five other letters in the alphabet that I could continue with along those lines.
As to the eventuality of it all, the Stoics would remind us that we all wind up in the same dirt, emperor and slave alike. As to the spirituality, Yoda, paraphrasing pretty much whatever real/real prophet you prefer, teaches that we are luminous beings, not just crude matter. As to the human experience, former cable car operator turned Poet Laureate, Maya Angelou, once wrote: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
And me, just some middle-aged guy with a blog, one who had a recent success, who constantly works to forgive himself for and learn from his losses and mistakes, who remembers that he will eventually die and be forgotten, who seeks to continue knowing better and doing better until then, believes that you are so very much more, you explorer, you survivor, you luminous being.
