The Story Of My Life

Are you ready for this?

We wake up as babies in a crib somebody organized for us. That’s true. And we spend ten or fifteen years, maybe twenty, in a place these strangers that we got to know organized for us. (If we were lucky! That was nice of them.)  But we are still the people we are, the persons our DNA says we are. We had to have added lots of stuff to what we were from what we learned from happenings around us.

 As I watch the early days in the life of my great-granddaughter I think about that. We are a hodge-podge of what we went through in our formative years and what happened to us afterward.

In the end, we are the ones who had to put it all together, We were the persons in charge. I am wondering now if I was in charge or just a sponge soaking it all up. How much of it all ran out of my pores and how much stuck? How much of what I learned actually stuck to the walls of my body, my brain? Think about it in your own life. How was it for you out there?

I remember I was in grade five in school when I began to think of myself as a person in charge of making things happen. I became conscious of things that I wanted to have happen. Guided by some ego-drive, I wanted to show off, to show people what a terrific person I was. Up to that time I was just a cipher, a creature to whom things just happened, a plaything of fate and external forces. I began, then, to think of myself as a prime mover, maybe even the Messiah, placed on earth to do what were the right things to be done..

Where was I coming from? I must have learned that there were bad things that happen to people and that things could be better than they were. I must have learned that leadership could make a difference. I must have come to the conclusion that I was so good, so all-knowing, that I could provide that leadership. Or, I was off my rocker!

How could I have possibly come to that conclusion? Thinking back, I have a theory. It’s all about communicable diseases.

I started school like all my contemporaries. Born in April, I may have been enrolled in September at six and a half with my six-year old classmates. But, while in grade two, I had one communicable disease after another, so much absent that I was kept back to repeat the year. By the time I was in grade five, I was in the third year with classmates who were up to a year and a half younger. Naturally I tended to stand out. I jumped to the conclusion I was really something special. Even my teacher fell for it and wanted to send me to a school for superior children.

By the time I was in grade seven the illusion had faded. I was back among the average. But those ideas are hard to kill. In spite of the scholastic facts I had to face, in my heart of hearts I continued to nurse the idea that I was meant for great things.

Get the picture now? My head was full of fairy tales as I went about the business of doing the necessary,. In my arrogance all those who may have worked and sacrificed to advance my development, those who fed and housed me, providing emotional capital, were merely minor actors in my drama .  

I was determined to ensure that the world clearly saw that I was the perfect product of my own creation, the potential savior of the world. I was convinced I needed no-one’s help to accomplish that. I would do all this on my own.

Maturity was a humbling experience. Marriage and fatherhood, the nitty-gritty of day-to-day start-up employment, and paying the bills, taught me lessons which dashed the grandiose illusions from my mind. For most of my years it again appeared to me that I was indeed a mere cipher in the hands of a fate beyond my control. In the back of my mind I continued to search desperately in my work environment for that chance to be a shooting star .

The focus to do a better job in my immediate personal space, for the people who truly depended on me, was the opportunity I missed in good part. That realization came only when the time for doing that was mostly passed.

I did find some opportunities to do some of the things in my world that would, in part, sate my hunger to make a mark on the world’s scaffolding. Some millions may have felt an impact from my efforts without any appreciation that it came from myself as the source.

Many of us accomplish these things in the ordinary course of our lives without necessarily anointing ourselves as divine. I draw some satisfaction for my cravings from some small events wherein my performance was central.

As to the circle around myself, my near and dear, their importance has exploded and expanded for me with each day that I remain alive. I try to make up for so much lost time. I lacked full focus in this area for too long a time.

 I continue to remember the events of a rapidly fading past when, for brief periods, I was a prime mover, of importance to a multitude of others. Of little consequence in the minds of others, those memories offer me recompense for my efforts in those arenas.

Like so many of you out there, I display my secret trophies for an audience of only one. Our memories of greatness remain part of the world we create for ourselves, acknowledged only by ourselves.