Am I not Already Great?

Photo: www.popscreen.com.

So someone once asked me, “What do you hope to achieve with your life?”

I paused, for it is not very often that you consciously reflect on grand things like this. Seconds later, I found my voice and replied:

“I don’t know. A couple of ‘things’ come to mind though: a shamanic affinity with my changing ‘world’; a magical consciousness – which for me indicates some liberation from the shackles of patriarchal godhood stories; some freedom to subversively negotiate my origins and destiny; a small life of joyfully intense intimacy with those that I ‘love and care for’; an ebullient sense of undying adventure and wonder; a restrainedly rapturous and liberating culture of insignificance – a life looking down on the wall clock, not up to it. Most of all, I long for a soft, poetic sense of serenity – a life mindfully improvised. However, I would not think of these ‘things’ as achievements; I would rather think of them as gifts – gifts I once had but lost; gifts that were denied me by my education, my co-morbidity with modern civilization and its discontents; gifts that I grew blind to because I exchanged enchanted eyes for ‘rational’ eyes.”

“Do you not want greatness? Do you not want to contribute to the life of others?” he pressed on, convinced I was holding back the softer, juicier tendons of the meat of the matter.

“But am I not ‘great’ already?” I asked in response.

“Am I not one with an amazingly intricate universe – paradoxically part of its wealth and yet a source of it? Have you considered those pulsating galaxies swirling around in sunless night? Have you ever truly relished the humbling spectacle of a bumblebee in flight? Do you ever stop to hear the pollination songs in an otherwise lifeless field – moments when little things that cannot be seen dance to summon new colours and new flowers from the ground?

It is modernity’s fragmented psyche that cordons us off these beautiful spaces where affirmation, celebration and groundedness thrive, and then ironically sets us off on a rat-race to reclaim them. So we pant after ‘relevance’, revel in the luxuries of popular affection – but only for a while. We contrive lofty visions to emancipate the ‘other’, all the while failing to recognize that the problem is not the ‘other’, but the very fact of his ‘otherness’ – the fact that we have reified him as separate, distant, and impoverished, the fact that we have conveniently made him fodder for the self-righteous bonfire of our own salvation.

No, I do not wish for ‘greatness’ and the wars of conquest, creed and colonization it has engendered. I wish only to be reminded, over and over again, that the ‘other’ only exists in my fractured mind, and that to accept her as part of me is enough. Hypocritical, incomplete, wounded – but poetically enough.”

*****