What I mean is : we try so hard to fit in with one group or another. All our lives, we run around as though life is one big popularity contest. In actuality, all that should really matter is : being relevant. We should not strive to simply "fit in," we should strive to matter. We should attempt to leave a mark. We should be what our generation, our family, our friends NEED us to be. We should be what we were CREATED to be.
Take me, for example : I am a talker. I can't help it. Ask me a question, and it's like someone turned my chat switch to "on." I've always been this way. As a child, I needed to be the center of attention. That really hasn't changed, because it is who I was created to be. In our society, however, that's not really acceptable. It's not "ok" for a grown woman to be the center of attention. I try so hard NOT to be who I was created to be, sometimes, that it hurts.
I'm a leader. I was born that way. In fact, I was probably President of Kindergarten (in my own mind, at least). I know I was Valentine Day Queen and Rusty was the King when I was in 2nd grade...don't ask me how I remember that.
I look at my son, and I wonder what he'll grow up to be. We joke (sort of) and say he'll be a left handed MLB pitcher (halfway there....looks like he'll be a southpaw), or maybe he'll discover a cure for some dread disease. Really all I care about is that he's happy. I don't want him giving up on his own dreams. I want to do everything in my power to ensure that he achieves his highest desires. I want him to strive to be who he was created to be. I want him to be relevant in his time.
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2 comments:
There is another school of thought that "relevance" is a horror.
Relevant is always in relation to the time one lives, or in resonance with the popular belief, etc. So we could say Goering, Goebbels and Eichmann were relevant for their society.
The Frankfurt School rejected relevance in favor of an avant garde; the people who held a higher standard than the masses and paid attention to the things that spoke to humanity far beyond the here and now. Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm, etc.
Nietzsche and the Ancient Greeks felt the best life was to never to have been born, or to at the very least, die young before you could "smear" the world with your "fingerprints."
Anyway, why are you over here now and not at the LJ land?
I got sucked in to blogger...
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