When was the last time you achieved something that you’d previously thought beyond your reach? I’ll wait. Now, when was the last time you failed to achieve something you considered well within your reach? If your first response was something along the lines of, “Well, being Wordmasters champion was pretty swell,” and your second response was, “this morning,” I have good news and bad news. (Read the following sentence in the voice of Ice-T from Law and Order SVU if Ice-T were censored by a colonial reenactor): The bad news is you’re guilty, you punk pair of bitches.
The good news is that you’re guilty of something that we all do as humans, like eating too many Honey Buns, procrastinating and tripping. “Intelligent design” my pasty butt — when was the last time you saw a cheetah get caught up in it legs at 60 mph (a speed I’ve been told they can reach)? We run with half as many appendages, and move at far slower speeds. To be fair, though, there aren’t many potholes in the Serengeti. If cheetahs don’t actually live in the Serengeti, please don’t write in to correct me.
Everyone that’s ever thought they could go on American Idol and at least do better than that guy who covered ‘She Bangs,” has also made the mistake of setting unrealistic goals despite not even being able to floss regularly. That’s a hefty majority of us. I’m not advocating nihilism here. Showing that level of interest in others’ lives would be pointless and dishonest of me to do as a nihilist. What I’m saying is upon closer inspection, we may not be as guilty for these failings as we first assume.
First off, on a daily basis we face far more easily accomplishable tasks than ones that seem out of reach. Thus, we are more likely to let gimmies slip through the cracks. It’s the 1 credit phenomenon; you took that once-per-week environmental science course first year as a GPA booster. You thought you’d play in the dirt, meet some cuties that were, “like, really into the outdoors, even though the last time I went hiking I got poison ivy on my tongue,” and walk away, no sweat. But, in a fatal miscalculation, you let the class slip by and walked away with a B, a bruised ego, and poison ivy on your tongue (you didn’t realize she’d been hiking so recently!).
More importantly, when it comes to the big stuff, like getting (back) into shape, finding someone to share your life with, or reorganizing your “Animorphs” book collection by ecosystem, the rule of “control inversion” applies. This rule states that the larger the goal in question, the less of the outcome you directly control. Proof of this, like Christmas in ‘Love Actually’, is all around. Just listen to someone accept an Oscar, a dream they’ve had since their earliest days as an actor, pretending to like the tacky sweater they got from Grandma (It’ll come around in college and be cool again, just wait it out). After hearing all the names of the people other than the recipient themselves who apparently deserve the award far more than they do, and without whose help they wouldn’t be standing there, bravely fighting back tears, you’re about ready to take that golden statue back, thank you very much.
There’s an obvious flip side here. Did I “deserve” to get into the University any more than I deserved to fall face-first into that manure pile in fifth grade while trying to impress Brooke Oshefsky with my balance (“I’m quite nimble for my height!”)? Both involved hefty amounts of bullshit and what an anthropologist might call ‘peacocking.’ If you’re wondering where the manure came from, I lived in Wisconsin. You can’t tip a cow without hitting a pile of the stuff.
The point is that the same confounding and external forces that allowed me to eagerly wolf down a mouthful of Gus Burger and go, “...meh,” are equally responsible for any misfortunes that may befall me in the form of a mouthful of rich, fertilizing cow poop. (And, while we’re on the topic, the two tastes weren’t dissimilar).
To anyone who has played a team sport and seen the ball slip past a goalie that was busy admiring dandelions, this is not a new concept. I merely ask that you approach your life in the same manner. It’s a team sport; it’s just a lot harder to figure out who has to run extra laps when your college application gets lost and you never hear back from your dream school, just assume they didn’t want you, and reluctantly inherit your father’s boutique farm animal business, “Shear and Utter Beauty.”
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