Born to dis-satisfaction?

"There is no passion to be found in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living." -- Nelson Mandela

At the outset, let me set a few parameters: I am a very big fan of Nelson Mandela and all that he has come to stand for in South Africa and the world at large, that the work that he did and the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are inspirations to me and have inspired an awful lot of my academic work. That said, this quote bothers me.

And here's why:

How do we know what kind of life we are capable of living? What ever happened to the societal paradigm where we were born into a community, we did the best with what we had but did not necessarily seek to enlarge our lot, only to improve it through reasonable means, and died snug in a faith we didn't challenge? Now, I'm clearly not for this sort of thing-- I've been hopping international fences and taking classes in existential philosophy for too long now to pretend that I espouse this belief, but whatever happened to it and why do we have to doom ourselves to a lacklustre life if we fail to live a life which fully tests the limits of our capacity?

From birth in the First World we are pumped full of rhetoric regarding our capabilities; we are each destined for greatness, there's nothing we can't do if we set our minds to it, reach for the stars, aim high, genius is in the eye of the beholder and other such platitudes of bullshit. It's not really true. Yes, there are those among us who have the grey matter to make an impact upon the lives of others and maybe the social consciousness of our time, but they have to have the ambition to do so, the funding to procure the education which will enable them to do so, the luck to acquire either good health or the money to buy it, and the sheer roulette of fortune to make the connections and favourable impressions which will open the proper doors and the opportune times. That's more than any one person can control all by their lonesome, and yet we tell our children all these lies and dress them up as encouragement. We're not all capable of finding a cure for cancer. Not all of us are cut out for rocket science. In fact, a fair few of us aren't really college material.

Controversial? I suppose, but we're not all created equal in any way but rights and possibly the eyes of a benign creator if you go in for that sort of thought. If not, this all gets a lot bleaker. If you do, then the hope which is chalk and pinion to existence remains.

We aren't all brain boxes, but we can work steadily and heartily to the best of our ability. Is that what Mr. Mandela meant? That we can only find passion in pushing the boundaries of our lives and intentions wherever we find ourselves rather than offering another quote to the halls of high school graduation platitude? Can we not enjoy the passion of fulfilment at the end of a day of honest labour, of a cold drink on a hot day and the trembling of exercised muscles and a quiet mind? Can't we be happy with a quiet and ordinary life, or must we always be plagued by the creeping, whispering sprite of malcontent that we could have done better, that we might have dressed in silks and ermine and led a life of greater height?

And what precisely is this passion which we're supposed to want in our lives or else be doomed to live in the diminished lack? Google provides the definition of the noun as "1. Strong and barely controllable emotion; 2. A state or outburst of such emotion. Synonyms: rage, ardour, ardor, anger, love." Now, not to play the Gentlewoman card too heavily, but it would seem that our lives would be a little easier if the persons in control of nuclear arsenals and crude oil reserves had a little less passion in their lives. Does that mean I've condemned them to not living up to their capability?

Now, in all honesty, I've never been much of a fan of passion as such. I find it frequently involves too many fluids, but I am for satisfaction. I am pro-joy. Can we have those fulfilments in a quiet life? Might one gentlewoman find happiness and a piece of sky teaching average students to write simply and occasionally take a holiday to a distant place? Maybe that's why the above quote struck such a sour chord with me this morning, but let me put it to you, gentle and unfamiliar readers:

Must it be settling if our lives are not pushed to the brink? Is passion the aim? Can we be happy without it?

Where to start...

... so, it's been a while. Let's move through this as quickly as possible:

I returned to the native land of snow and family-type quality time over the winter holiday season, returned to the Lovely Land of the Dean and found myself offered a job running a tutorial for the Film Department here at the University. Needless to say, me and my skint little wallet JUMPED on this opportunity. Funnily enough, I still haven't gotten paid for this position (paperwork issues) but I've found teaching my two sections of Intro to Film to be wildly, thoroughly and completely unexpectedly fulfilling. Who knew. I've tutorials that I lead on Friday mornings, a film screening in the afternoon, and compulsory lectures on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We show mostly decent, mainly interesting films like Apocalypse Now!, Vertigo, Once Upon a Time in the West and, (naturally) Braveheart. This last one I had managed to dodge seeing until this course. How is this possible, dear Miss Melville? you ask. Well, as I'm living in Scotland, I see no reason to muddy the waters with Mel Gibson's atrocious accent. I mean, really. Anyways... we'll talk about specific movies another time. My students run the gamut from Sid Vicious to Nancy Drew, but there are a few gems-- one young lad compares every (and I mean EVERY) film we watch to Die Hard. At first, I was mystified. Then, slightly annoyed. But then, honestly, it takes some work to draw the link between Rear Window and that Rickman classic. At this point, I figure it must have been a bet, and I'm totally giving him extra points for the legitimate effort and attention. I am now hip-deep in astonishingly sub-par essays and all of my grading is due in tomorrow... riiiiiiiight.

I'm still holding down my jobs with the Student Association and the Gentleman's Club. I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to guess which one I prefer. Again, more on these in separate posts.

Danger Muffin just got her acceptance letter to a masters' program at St. Andrews University yesterday, but I haven't seen her yet to take her out for a pint. I know, I'm an awful flatmate... This means I will be looking for a new flatmate for August, I'd imagine, but somehow I know that there will never be another quite like Danger Muffin.

And as for me... well, I turned 24 on Saturday last. It's strange, I don't know why this one is hitting me quite so hard. I've been aware, once or twice before, of the passing of time. Of wanting to slow it down to a bare minimum crawl-- looking at my parents, my siblings gathered in the kitchen, seeing how old we've all grown... it's strange. I tried explaining my feelings on the issue to Danger Muffin with the tired old perfume bottle metaphor: it's like you have a bottle of your very favorite perfume, you know full well that you will never acquire another bottle and yet you wear it every day because you love it so. And now you look at it and see the sum of all those little morning spritzes, liquid halfway up the little tube, the vacuum in the top of the bottle, and you know that it will never be full again, that you will reach the bottom. But you're going to wear it every day. See what I mean about a tired metaphor? I turned 23 on the 23rd last year and it was a bit of a show-- Kaypea was in town, it was quite the do. This year-- far more sedate. I don't feel like a kid anymore. I think, without consciously realizing it, I capped my youth and childhood with that Golden Birthday year, and now I'll never be 23 again. Not that I'm really lamenting this, not that I'd do anything differently with it. It's just the knowledge that I'll never have it back again. Strange. And a little disjointing.

That's enough for now. Ask me about Norway, the Club, the Dirty Diss, M3, Boston, the Almighty Mobile, fiction and Subliminal Unicorns in the near future.