Want to be special

1206: 

Instead of being judgemental of others, I would rather look for ways in which another person is special, even great.  I choose to go looking for it, and I see it in them because I can’t miss it, because it’s there.  But if you don’t consciously go looking for it, then it goes unnoticed.

It’s very different to believing of ourselves that we are special.  And to use that as an excuse to do as we like.  And that might be our biggest problem, because we each want to be special, to be better or more outstanding than others, as famous people often seem to be and believe themselves to be.  We all know that famous people are few in number, whereas the not-famous are many.  Perhaps our wish for specialness is a tilt at immortality and a wanting to be remembered, as if that could make us happy.  And that ends up as being vanity gone crazy!

Children these days are told they are special and when they find out they aren’t, that they’ve been lied to and that they really have to earn any form of greatness, they lose sight of it.  As we grow up we eventually settle for conformity.  Whatever greatness we might have in us is allowed to wither and become meaningless.  If we cling onto the idea of unearned specialness, it becomes narcissistic, and then frustration hits back at us and we lose sight of our more impressive attributes.  We become uncertain of ourselves and all we ever see are our past mistakes.  We say to ourselves, “I wouldn’t have done that if I were really great”. “Truly great people are not like me”, and, “I can’t identify with their greatness because it’s too different to anything I can see in myself”.

         

When kids are asked what they want to be when they grow up they often say “famous”, which probably means they just want to be thought of as ‘great’, in order to feel special.

         

The hum drum world might not recognise us because we’re not rich or worthy.  We come to believe that we don’t deserve to be rewarded for who we are: if I am nothing, and have nothing, it’s because I’m not special enough.  And so eventually we give up on our own greatness and try to emulate those who seem ‘much greater than me’.  We lose touch with our own original thinking (based on instinct and personal experience) and say, “If ‘they’ do it, then it must be okay for me to do it”.  But, as it happens, the ‘emulated ones’ might not be very great at all.  Looked at closely, they might not be setting much of an example at all.

         

So we take the kids to the zoo, and parade them in front of majestic lions which are kept locked behind bars.  We say “me human: you animal; me great: you nothing but banged up prisoners”.  It doesn’t make us feel ‘great’ but at least, in the eyes of our children who we’ve taken to the zoo, it makes us feel a whole lot better about ourselves.  We’re momentarily popular with the kids.  For the moment, we’re ‘special’ to them.  But it doesn’t prove anything, since we still don’t see the specialness in ourselves.