Head's Up...
At the risk of showing my age, I will be relating a brief flash in time during my fourth grade year - approximately 27 years ago. Fourth grade was held in a metal building outside of the brick school and I'm not sure the criteria for being the class that was relegated to the metal building. Still though, having to go between the brick and metal buildings for lunch felt like a really naughty respite in the midday (we lived in Appalachia and I didn't get out much). Especially for a kid like me that spent a lot of time in the classroom with the teacher during recess. I am digressing.
When it was raining or when my teacher had probably had it, we played, "Head's Up, Seven Up!" I've found the rules,
My teacher, in her infinite wisdom, imparted a technique, "Don't pick someone that would suspect you. Pick someone that isn't your good friend." When heads went down and I was selected, I knew exactly who'd selected me. As students were guessing who'd picked them, a lot of them didn't get it right but I did. I named the most popular kid in my class because I knew the directive was to pick someone that isn't your friend. What a smart winner I was.
I was picked last for every forced sporting event through the remainder of my grade and high school career (you can't blame kids - I was a fat and uncoordinated asthmatic that hated gym class and regularly feigned every illness in the book to not embarrass myself regularly at the bevvy of different humiliating activities that we were forced to endure as students of differing abilities and needs under the same lazy curriculum run by man that wore matching windbreaker suits on purpose and whose family owned half the town). This isn't my attempt to write a redemptive missive about how I overcame it all to find infinite self-love and success - so please hang on.
I have been picked second, third or not at all most of the time in my life (from those closest to me to those that see you as a monkey at a keyboard) and it never gets any easier. We cannot control the selectors. We cannot control the methodology. This is the part of the story where I would say that we can only control ourselves (take back our power, dammit!). It is true. However, to pretend that the selectors and their methodologies don't hurt us is wholly untrue.
Sometimes our intelligence, passion, drive, ethic and output aren't enough and those reasons aren't an unfair travesty or a social injustice. Those situations can be particularly painful because it seems like both the rhyme and the reason are a plotting universe shift that cannot be fought fairly or unfairly. It doesn't matter, in the moment, to hear a logical explanation of your runner-up medal - in the moment it feels like the medal is all that will be remembered.
Addiction language can be helpful in this instance. That reality can be, "cunning, baffling and powerful," in the face of what dramatically shitty things happen in direct contrast of or in tandem with our work and intention. That we can equate the power of addiction to the mystery of life. And yet, we're told that both are easy to overcome with hard work and perseverance.
When it was raining or when my teacher had probably had it, we played, "Head's Up, Seven Up!" I've found the rules,
Seven students stand in front of the class. The rest of the students put their heads on their desks. The seven then move about and each touches a student. Once touched, a student sticks his or her thumb up. Then the seven say “heads up seven up!” The students who were touched then get a chance to guess which of the seven touched each of them. If they guessed right, they get to change places and be one of the students in the front.
I was picked last for every forced sporting event through the remainder of my grade and high school career (you can't blame kids - I was a fat and uncoordinated asthmatic that hated gym class and regularly feigned every illness in the book to not embarrass myself regularly at the bevvy of different humiliating activities that we were forced to endure as students of differing abilities and needs under the same lazy curriculum run by man that wore matching windbreaker suits on purpose and whose family owned half the town). This isn't my attempt to write a redemptive missive about how I overcame it all to find infinite self-love and success - so please hang on.
I have been picked second, third or not at all most of the time in my life (from those closest to me to those that see you as a monkey at a keyboard) and it never gets any easier. We cannot control the selectors. We cannot control the methodology. This is the part of the story where I would say that we can only control ourselves (take back our power, dammit!). It is true. However, to pretend that the selectors and their methodologies don't hurt us is wholly untrue.
Sometimes our intelligence, passion, drive, ethic and output aren't enough and those reasons aren't an unfair travesty or a social injustice. Those situations can be particularly painful because it seems like both the rhyme and the reason are a plotting universe shift that cannot be fought fairly or unfairly. It doesn't matter, in the moment, to hear a logical explanation of your runner-up medal - in the moment it feels like the medal is all that will be remembered.
Addiction language can be helpful in this instance. That reality can be, "cunning, baffling and powerful," in the face of what dramatically shitty things happen in direct contrast of or in tandem with our work and intention. That we can equate the power of addiction to the mystery of life. And yet, we're told that both are easy to overcome with hard work and perseverance.
Epilogue
Everything above except the last sentence was written in April - and here we are on the eve of September and I still am picked both first and last. All of it imparts lessons and mysteries that do not seem to make sense when aligned with dreams.
I watched a short film about Philosopher Herbert Finagrette and there are two things that stuck with me so fully that I had to tell the ether about them. His struggles with his own pragmatic views about death as a younger man paired with the inevitability at ninety-seven resonate so deeply in the depths of the search for meaning.
I find in many ways I am a puzzle to myself.
...
As much as I think our life in this world is a pretty messy affair, I would still like to hang around.
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