#human excellence

[mack-7-0]

You have survived 100% of your hardest days. Every battle you’ve faced has prepared you for the next chapter.

[notumbusbumbus]

A Brief Musing on Excellence

Notty Bumbo, 2023

I love when I read something someone has created that shows me their aim, who they have evolved to in this instant. It makes me feel welcomed once again into the broader human genius, where I want excellence to be in everything humans do. To be clear, and honest and insightful, to generate the world from imaginations and joys and sorrows alike. To hold back nothing in the use of one’s mind. To be unafraid to speak truth even at risk of one’s existence.

I am always reminded of the great poem by Rilke – The Man Watching – where the protagonist, Jacob, is faced with wrestling an angel, knowing already he will fail. Yet he commits fully despite that knowledge, as “whoever was beaten by this angel, (who often simply declined to fight), went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand, and kneaded him as if to change his shape…” (Bly’s translation)

I have always read this poem as a challenge to existence, an acknowledgement of our weakness and our determination, to seize this being we wake up inside each day. We all will die, but we go on. The Universe lives before and after our presence. But while here, we struggle, create, change. Hopefully, we evolve enough to make our time here a bit longer.

It seems as well that we see such individuals when times are most precarious, when the nightly news becomes vile and bewildering. How could our better natures have allowed this chaos to have gone so far? I then am forced to consider how so much of all human cultures has never been about the future, has become trapped in compounded illusions in reality itself. A type of excellence at once perverse and corrosive, where we are so captured by phantoms of thought we cannot – dare not - think of confronting our falsified and broken natures.

Still, the urge toward evolution is embedded in our every cell, not merely for our physical body, but the spiritual and mental journey we take through time. For individuals who have stepped through the portals of curiosity and intellect, there is no going back to those ancient illusions. There is only excitement, delight, and yes, urgency. Such beings realize our time may be shorter than imagined, our passage through this existence, in this vast and astonishing Universe, likely brief.

Therefore they create, they learn, they keep pushing to understand. They make clear to the totality of humanity there is another choice besides giving up, going mad, make worse decisions as a species. A choice that pursues solutions across all parts of human endeavor, whether emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or societal. Whether we as a species makes this shift – to acknowledge and work to confront our own demise – will be the ultimate test of this premise. There will be no sidelines from which the fearful can watch at a safe distance of such an effort.

And this is why I celebrate those people, old and young, who seek answers to our existential dilemma, one where we, working together as we have unabated since our emergence from the water, swamped in illusion, run so blithely toward our extinction. We need all who seek excellence, who work to refine their vision and understanding, to tip the scales of chance toward the voices that choose to live. To demonstrate the elevation of the potential inside our very design program. To give voice to the future, one that includes us all.

[tesserariuss]

the man, the ship

[moonbean117]

[tesserariuss]

After qualifying for the intellectually disabled tournament at the Sydney Games, the Spanish paralympic basketball team was revealed to field non-intellectually disabled players.

[tesserariuss]

Tonya Harding had a celebrity sex tape: an explicit 'Wedding Video' showed her having sex with her then-husband, Jeff Gillooly. They had sold it together to Penthouse, for an advance of $200,000 each plus royalties.

[tesserariuss]

( •_•)– (_T_)

[tesserariuss]

Steven Bradbury won gold at the 2002 Winter Olympics in speed skating, because everyone in front of him crashed.