In a Perfect World
I’ve been writing essays on spiritual themes since the turn of this century and for the past sixteen years have been recording these musings for Listen Well. I suspect, given my questionable powers of organization, that I have repeated a story here and there. We could toss this up to the invaluable power of repeated teaching stories—or just dizziness.
Here is a story that I find endlessly instructive, and I suppose I should preface it with a “forgive me if I have told you this one before.” But I won’t bother with that.
When I was twenty years old, I was enrolled in a dysfunctional performing arts college. In the beginning of my second year, the theater department added a new acting coach to its faculty. One of the first moves this man made was to have his students decipher and prepare the same monologue for his class. He chose the well-known “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the one in which the prince of Denmark philosophizes about the merits of remaining in life, given its difficulties. I took to the assignment with eagerness, having fallen in love with the great poet’s writings several years prior.
The day arrived when we were to perform our attempts at making sense of this rich piece of writing. Each of us stood in front of the group of perhaps ten classmates and delivered our unique renditions. I was fascinated. Each performance was so intriguingly personal. The interpretations of the meaning, the nuances, subtle colors, interpretive leanings of each student were wholly distinctive, incomparable, matchless.
Look at this wonderful garden of variation, I thought. In a perfect world, they would each be given the chance to play this role, to flesh it out with their own gifts. It seemed to me to offer a hint of what God feels about each of his children. Each of them a delight, each a marvel.
My reverie soon came to a screeching halt when the teacher stood up, turned to the class, and asked, “Well, which one did you think was the best?”
No! I inwardly howled. No, no no, don’t ruin this moment by comparing, by pitting us against one another. Don’t make this an exercise of winning and losing. Stop! You are stomping all over the beautiful garden. Don’t you see? And you are asking us to join you in our own destruction?
I have to believe, in a perfect word, there would be no competition, no gold medals, no awards, no good grades, bad grades, no best, no worst. We would watch the Olympics, for instance, not to uncover the top three performers but to marvel at the beauty of individual movement, form, balance, and courage of each participant. We would champion those willing to devote so many years of endless repetition out of passion for their chosen sport. There would be no commentators, no judges, only enthusiasts, those who delight in the possibilities of the human potential.
We would be like horticultural connoisseurs touring a public garden, maintained by a staff of passionate botanists, each with their special gifts; or as animal lovers on safari, as delighted with a sighting of a hyena as an elephant; or spectators at the Cirque du Soleil.
My friend Jenn tells me that she was trained to teach something called noncompetitive physical education to primary school children and joyfully taught this method of PE for several years. The point was to engender a zest for movement and teamwork in the absence of competition. They learned to juggle with scarves, keep balloons in the air together. Anytime teams were chosen it was done so randomly: those whose second letter of their first name falls within the first half of the alphabet are on team A, the rest are on team B, for example.
When I was a teenager, I learned to play tennis and quickly developed a fairly robust desire to win. Then one year a new friend of the family, a man in his fifties, joined us on the court. He was so comical, with the wackiest swing and kookiest form, that no one who played with him could keep from laughing. All of us, including this charming man, would be thrown into knee-grabbing fits of hysteria. No one ever cared about the score, only the comedy. I remember thinking, This is how I want to play tennis from now on.
In our capitalistic society, we are taught that competition is what drives success. We are encouraged to strive to be the top of the heap, winners, that God forbid you might fail or be perceived as a failure. Though I can appreciate where this notion comes from, seeded by our culture of success and failure, planted at a young age by our schooling, I believe that the true drive behind a successful life is love. But then, what do we consider a successful life to look like?
It seems clear that it will look very different on each of us. Some might be successful in taking one tiny step to save themselves. Another might look to be at the height of worldly success, handed a Grammy, for instance, and yet stiff the limo driver on the way home.
If there are such things as measurements for success, I imagine they are based on how we loved and not how many loved us.
I might be more sensitive than most to the concept of succeeding and failing given my early school years’ view from the bottom of my class. These days they would call what I struggled with a learning difference, but when I was a child, I was simply considered slow and had to be content with the D range of the grading scale. I had kind teachers, on the whole, who didn’t add the weight of disapproval to my chagrin, but the constant presence of failure was heavy. It haunted me for years. Much has changed, I understand. A child with my learning issues would be treated more individually, and yet, there is, inherent in our culture, this impression of polarity. We still grade students. There are still perceived winners and losers.
The man living on the street is seen as a loser, the man in the White House a winner. Seen from the heavens, this very well might be entirely upside down. But no matter how we might measure the worth of a man, whether hero or fiasco, the love of the man, as felt from the heavens, I believe, is always entirely equal.
Our world will not be a perfect one until we understand this. All the great teachers have tried to remind us of this. We are loved equally, not admired, not worthy of award, reward, not lauded, but cherished. All of us, unreservedly treasured.
We are flowers, each one of us, in the process of blossoming, eagerly reaching for the springtime of a perfect world.