Consolation for the ordinary?

Consolation for the ordinary?

Take heart, if you're ordinary, you may want to read this. Most likely than not, you are not as rich as the people you read about in the papers. Neither are you as popular nor as powerful. 

You are with the billions around the world struggling to make ends meet. You are hoping for that big break where you will be able to become extraordinary. 

Sociologists would call it social mobility, but to you, it's just plain old success the way you have planned or dreamt so hard about. 

But for now, you are mingling with the bottom billions, sacrificing autonomy for a regimental worklife, and being used as a means to someone's ends. 

Whether you like it or not, you are either a liability or an asset in the corporate ecosystem. You are employed to pursue a goal that pays you a wage just enough so that the people at the top can reap in above and beyond what is enough for themselves.

So, what's the consolation in that you asked? Where is the part that makes you feel better or good about yourself? 

Well, if the above is your current narrative, then sorry, I have no consolation for you. My idea of consolation for the ordinary is to see nothing that you do as ordinary if it is about living this brief stint here on earth to touch another life. 

You don't need to be an evangelist who preaches to millions or a minister who leads a revolution of change. You don't need to be a global entrepreneur who invents a product that changed the world or a billionnaire who performs philanthropy to the benefit of millions.

Seen in that perspective, our ordinariness starts on the wrong benchmark. If you hitch it to material possessions, then you can't help but feel ordinary. If you hitch it to fame and power, then you again can't help it but feel ordinary. If you hitch it to success as the world sees it, then well, there you are....ordinary. 

But, the challenge is, why can't you be considered extraordinary when the script you have been fed tells you that you ought to be feeling ordinary? Why should you take in the narrative of this world hook, line and sinker and retire into a form of learned helplessness or belaboured resignation?

You may just need more than a consolation if you are hitched onto the wrong bandwagon. For some, they may need nothing less than a regular dose of anti-depressant to pick themselves up on a daily or weekly basis. 

Take a spin and see things different. 

If you are married, think about keeping a covenant to remain faithful for a lifetime. If you are an employee, think about making a small different over the long run that adds up to a positive trajectory. 

If you have children, then think about the sacrifices and contentment of being a father or mother. Even if your are single, think about the people around you and how you can be a light in the darkness, the salt that stands firm on timeless virtues, and a ship with a firm rudder aligned to what is good, pure, hopeful, resilient and purposeful. 

But if that is the case, why the need for consolation then? Isn't a virtuous life to be celebrated and emulated?

Yes, it should, most surely it should. Yet, even for a life of virtue, the consolation is not for living such a celebratory life, but for bearing with our imminent and unavoidable death. At times, even the best of us needs the consolation to deal with what seems like an extinguishment of hope. 

No one stands exempted from it. All fame, power and wealth will not occupy more than a burial hole dug mechanically for us when we expire. Our tombstone may be grand, but the life is no more. 

And if you think about it that way, all of us are ordinary regardless of our most extraordinary effort, pursuit and recognition. For, if in our infinite ignorance, we are all equal, then in the finitude of our life, aren't we all equal too? 

So, stripped of all the embellishments of earthly titles and riches, we all stand before our grave the same way we came, ashes, dust and food for daffodils. 

And in the ordinariness of this life, the most enduring consolation would be to give of ourselves for another as a father would for his child, as a husband would for his marriage, as a mother would for the family, and as a friend would for a friend. 

Let me end with the words of Henri Nouwen: -

"There is such thing as a good death. We are all responsible for how we die. We can choose to cling on to life in such a manner that our death becomes nothing but a failure, or we can let go of it in total freedom so that we give of ourselves to another as a source of hope." 

There is a scriptural equivalent to that in Mark 8:35 as the late John Stott put it: -

"If you insist on holding on to yourself and living for yourself and refusing to let yourself go, you will lose yourself. But if you are prepared to lose yourself, to give yourself away in love for God and your fellow human beings, then in that moment of complete abandon, when you think you have lost everything, the miracle takes place and you find yourself." 

Amen. 

Cheerz.