it’s okay to live a life others don’t understand part 2

While wisdom may not yet be my strong suit, my life experiences might be helpful to others. Especially when it comes to the narratives we hear and repeat to ourselves. Be number one. Be a winner. You’re either a winner or a loser. What if we were to teach one another to find our strengths, make peace with our weaknesses? That would have been an exceptional life lesson for me to learn early on. Do your best and be happy playing your part. That’s another good lesson, one that took me the better part of my life to learn. In the last fifty-nine years I’ve had many amazing accomplishments laced with some spectacular failures, yet it has been the mining of my ordinariness that I’ve discovered and fully enjoyed the best parts of myself. With the aid of selective memory, my personal and professional failures transform into strong lessons that carry me forward. As a champion of screwing up massively only to have it all come out well in the end, I feel easy about failure and I respect the part it can play in our development. Recently I tried to share with a young friend that the concept of being number one in all things might not always be the best idea. Sometimes being number two or three offers us the perspective to see the wider picture, and to gather information, relationships, and experience before stepping forward. Being number one means someone is always coming after you. So things get missed. Important things. And the noise coming from the haters who have seriously accomplished nothing can be deafening. Rather than being the voice of dissent, falling in behind the number one can prepare us for future opportunities. Hopefully with a bit of wisdom. But not always.

I never liked the idea of winners and losers. Some games are not worth playing. Some challenges are not worth rising to. Some victories come at too great a cost. And sometimes we cannot see the best way to proceed until we've ceased trying to convince ourselves that the 'wrong' thing is the 'right' one. If we choose to stay in a bad situation simply because of the judgements of others, we lose anyway. While choosing to give up comes with a lot of baggage, it often reveals a more promising route ahead.

Motivation is everything. When I stopped comparing myself to others, my life got easier. I grew up in a home where the values, while very catholic, were somewhat askew. We were yet another version of the 1950’s/60’s white American working class story. The aspirational middle class suburban homeowner fleeing the city to seek reinvention in a place called “a better life”. In our house the undercurrent of finding fault was a way of being. My parents patterned it each night at the table talking about work. Talking about others. Comparing themselves against others. Trying to find the righteous place for some meaning of why things didn’t go their way. As I grew older and understood more of my parent’s story, I came to believe that while they did their best to adapt to adulthood and parenthood, they were not equipped to get past the pain and limits of their own childhood experiences. Like so many parents since the beginning of time, they did the best they could given the circumstances. To some degree, we all struggle against some of the corrosive messaging and dysfunctional patterns that filled our formative years. It wasn’t just my parents, it was everywhere.

In the past I’ve written that my emotional response to winning and losing are much the same. Regardless of the work put into a project, relationship or friendship, things usually turn out much the way I expected. Who knows? Maybe my brain is wired differently. Anyway, losing isn’t about not winning. It’s about not trying. And not trying has never been my issue.