I was watching a TED Talk late one recent evening, and stumbled across one that truly struck home in what may be yet another of my life’s epiphanies. I wonder how many you can be lucky enough to experience? Either way epiphany this idea may very well be for me. It’s the idea of “multiple potentialities. Why does this resonate so strongly for me? It ties in with something once said to me as a young man barely in my Teens. It ties in with something I’ve struggled with most if not all my life.
I had a teacher who I would say was a cut above the average. By that I mean not only was he genuinely interested in helping young people gain knowledge, he was a keen and shrewd judge of character no doubt developed by his other life experiences prior to coming to teaching. Additionally he recognised and acknowledged the responsibilities that came with his position and influence in the young people he dealt with on a daily basis, often for years, some for over a decade at a time.
He had noticed that I was in one of my early periods of depression and was in some way reaching out to me: even then he could see that for me, there would be a dark path before reaching the light. Although they didn’t have quite the same level of debilitation accompanying them at that time in my life, such bouts of Depression were clearly noticeable to some then because they spent a lot of time with me. Anyway, he’d come across me in the yard one lunch while he was on yard duty. He could see I was clearly troubled and just basically started chatting in a more casual but candid manner than the standard Teacher to Student. The upshot of which was that while unrecognised by me at that stage, he’d clearly recognised I was confused because already I was experiencing frustration with an education system that wasn’t acknowledging the intellectual being that I was becoming. He could see what I had yet to recognise, and which even later once seen am still just accepting now. The succinctness with which he expressed it still surprises me today.
It is the following that has stayed with me since that day.
“Your problem is that you could be anything you set your mind to be, and you have no idea what that means for you other than you’re afloat without a compass,” and slight further on, “no single path will ever satisfy you.”
The enormity of that statement was lost on me at the time, but the statement itself was not, and for that I’ve always been grateful, although, until now, I’ve never really known why.
So back to this TED Talk presentation. It’s called Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling.. I sat watch just nodding my head with bells ringing like crazy. I still haven’t quite regained my emotional & mental balance two days after, but I’m getting there. This has opened a whole new mental hallway for me. I’m NOT mediocre, I’m NOT flaky, I’m NOT undisciplined (mostly), I’m just too interested in too many things and too good at a lot of them. I’m NOT a genius, but I’m very damn good at most things I put my mind & hands too! It just seems I’m the last to see this in me.
Other than the above mentioned discussion, if your interested or wondering more, Start Here.