OMG Digital Magazine OMG Issue 287 14th December 2017 | Page 6

OMG Digital Magazine | 287 | Thursday 14 December 2017 • PAGE 6
SoulFood
2 Pernicious Fantasies Standing Between
You and Who You’re Meant to Be
By Camille DeAngelis
There’s something else Eckhart Tolle says that has stuck
with me, and I suspect it will do you good to hear it too:
“’Greatness’ is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy
of the ego.”
This line makes me giddy every time I read it. If it doesn’t
ultimately matter how impressed other people are (or
aren’t) with our efforts, then what’s left is absolute creative
freedom.
“Greatness”—as we typically interpret it in this twisted,
vapid culture of ours—is an illusion. We’re forever
confusing recognition with inherent value. If Leonardo
had been preoccupied with painting a Last Supper scene
that would last through the ages, he wouldn’t have
experimented with that weird mixture of oil and tempera
on dry plaster. But he took that risk, got on with it, and
made something the monks of Santa Maria delle Grazie
would appreciate every time they sat down to eat.
The concepts of “greatness” and “mediocrity” are
pernicious fantasies. Eradicate these words from your
mind as if they were a virus, because in a sense, they are.
First let’s consider the logical absurdity. “Who’s in
charge of measuring everyone else’s achievements?”
the psychologist Ellen Langer has asked. “Who made
that yardstick?” Even if you can answer this rhetorical
question—your mother, the executive at the record label,
your high-school art teacher who thought she was doing
you a favor by saying “you don’t have it in you to be the
kind of artist you want to be”—you have to admit that you
are giving these people power and influence they do not
intrinsically possess.
This isn’t about comparing your career to someone else’s,
coming up short and feeling shitty about it. This pernicious
fantasy affects us on the inside, tainting our personal lives,
and our personal lives are our bedrock. The underlying
issue here isn’t mediocrity. It’s a lack of humility. It’s so
tempting to dismiss my high school classmates who’ve
gone the route of kids, mortgage, and 9-to-5 office jobs as
“mediocre,” and I’d be lying if I said I’ve never given into
it. When we talk about wanting to be “great,” we implicitly
set ourselves above others. We see ourselves as chosen
where others are not. And is there anything remotely
honorable about narcissism?
I’ve recently been introduced to a new way of looking at
the words ordinary and extraordinary. In this worldview—
articulated by the philologist Franklin Edgerton by
way of my Hinduism professor—an ordinary life is an
unexamined life. In this paradigm, the plumber who
watches “The Power of Myth” and discusses it with his
wife over homemade pizza on a Saturday night is indeed
living an extraordinary life, a life of questioning and
delving for hidden meaning, of seeking (and finding)
spiritual succor in even the most unlikely places. In this
sense, true “greatness”—if we must use that word—lies
in simply using what we’ve been given, of pushing our
frontiers and redrawing our own borders. If I’m right—if
human achievement lies in what I like to call manifesting
the awesome rather than tapping one’s inherent ability—
then we all have the capacity for genius, even those whom
traditional science and medicine have labeled abnormal
or inadequate in some way. In this paradigm, mediocrity
is a habit rather than a life sentence.
When I was very young I wanted to be a “great” novelist,
but now I just think in terms of the next project, of how
it will stretch and frighten me. If I draw a comparison, I
measure who I am against who I could be, the person I
can grow into if I remain willing, over a period of years, to
stick out my neck day after day. If I don’t illustrate my own
stories, if I don’t write with candor about my feelings of
jealousy and inadequacy, if I don’t someday stand up in
front of a thousand people and speak articulately (despite
my thundering heart) about all these topics of such critical
importance to all of us—ego and humility and creativity
and intuition—then I will have to look back on my career
and acknowledge that it has been a mediocre one. This
judgment will have nothing to do with anyone else’s
standards or opinions, and everything to do with my own.