How to Be Awesome in a Not So Awesome World
Honestly, I do not know.
The headline is a literary device meant to lure you to read this pile of horse shit. But I bet it worked, because people always seem to struggle in this department -to be awesome in whatever they do and you know, stay the fuck there.
In the aisle of awesomeness, shoppers looking for this distinction go down that aisle to pick out their awesome suit. Sure, it must not be all awesome to some people, but to them, they are now the child of Thom Yorke, Patti Smith, Chad Baker, Marlon Brando, and perhaps Margaret Thatcher combined.
They shine so bright, they can’t even look at themselves without squinting. Have you ever self-gawk? Amazing people gawk at themselves all the time.
Actually, awesome people don’t look at themselves in the mirror; they make other people look at themselves in the mirror. It’s not a question of how do they sleep at night, it’s how others do.
Though this doesn’t happen all the time, most of the time, people prefer to hang around nearby and look at other people being awesome. And I wonder why. Why can’t we just stay at being awesome? It’s not even crowded. That aisle of awesomeness in that department of amazing is opened 24 hours.
Sure, you might not get what I am talking about because I’m waxing philosophical and analogical at the same time. Awesomeness aisle? Amazing department? Dude, get a job -you might say.
Bear with me, all three of you.
At this juncture, I would like to state the obvious that awesome can be just about anything.
It could be you wanting to bang many chicks, dudes, or both at the same time and not get a disease -awesome.
It could be you wanting to whip up a Basil salmon terrine (don’t know what that is, but it looks difficult to make) -awesome.
It could be you, old-fashionably, looking for love and found it -awesome.
Get your written work published, get a window seat in the office, be awesome in everything. Awesome. Awesome. Rather ambitious, but still awesome.
If you, like me, have been awesome at least once in your life, you will know that that shit don’t last. It has it’s own shell-life depending on what you want to be awesome in. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t. You fail miserably at something you were once awesome in and then you become awesome in it again.
Note that there will be people telling you that you are not awesome, and we tend to believe them more than ourselves. This also sits in the box of “vice-versa”… and also in the box of “douche” and “I-can’t-believe-you-said-that”.
It is needless to say that we see the world in our likeness. I think it was Gandhi who said that we see the world not for what it is but for who we are. It was either Gandhi or Genghis, I can’t be sure, they sound the same.
Take the film Cast Away starring Tom Hanks as a plump Tom Hanks and a chiselled Tom Hanks. His character Chuck Noland was pretty awesome in his job as a globe-trotting system-analyst for FedEx. When his plane crashed and he found himself stranded in an island all alone with a volleyball he named Wilson, he wasn’t close to being remotely awesome.
But Chuck got awesome eventually during his 4-year stay on the island. Catching fish with a flick of a spear and starting fires as quickly as one would with a gas stove. So much awesomeness in that guy.
His return home got him back to not being awesome again. Sitting in the “it-sucks-to-be-you” category, Chuck was considered dead, had a funeral, his fiancé married their dentist and bore a child, and he didn’t even know how to sleep on a plush, comfy bed anymore.
Chuck wasn’t awesome in a place that he was once very awesome in.
I think this applies to everyone. We fail so many times and we make the disgusting choice to compare our failures with the best of them and to the worst of ourselves. With Chuck’s inability to be awesome at a place he was once awesome in, I think we can easily forget how awesome we can get if we just try; or try again.
It is somewhat hard to recover from being usually awesome at a thing and being fucked-up at it once. People call it a reality check. I call it a reality cheque, because the value of being hungry at what you love doing the most is invaluable. It keeps you moving.
Whether you are looking for love, life or yourself, I think the most awesome thing is that you are actually looking.
You turn up.
What you are looking for actually matters to you. And what matters to you is awesome. Don’t let those in the “douche” boxes tell you otherwise. They are hanging outside the aisle you are already in.
I don’t think we fear the unknown, we just fear our previous experiences in it or map it from the experiences of others. Because the unknown is well, the unknown. Unless you paint a picture of it in your current likeness, or you see the world not for what it is but for who you are (Gandhi totally said that), then the unknown (or the future) will be figured accordingly.
Look at Freddy Krueger, his world is a mad world. Freddie Mercury on the other hand -awesome.
There’s a term for this that I read somewhere. It’s called something-something biasness -sorry, not much help there. We foresee the result of a forthcoming action through the result that we’ve experienced previously from a similar action.
We are bias of our own future. A future that we can shape and form any way we damn please.
You might have had a heartache, a blotched bank heist, a car that never starts unless your ex is in it, cut yourself slicing a cucumber when you are making a sandwich, whatev…. I think the real question is: are you still trying, do you love what you are looking for, do you still… turn up?
The world is as awesome as we would like to make it out to be -in our total awesome self.
Update: It’s called cognitive bias. :)
