A Skill I Wish More People Had

A skill I wish more people had is the ability to observe what other people are doing without thinking that they are supposed to do the same thing. "The ability to be outclassed" comes to mind. Do things as well as you think they can or should be done. If someone else does them "better," enjoy that person's success. If someone else does them "wrong," time will tell.

Why conform?

I see so much unhappiness among people who think they're meant to copy someone else, when they are clearly not.

A few years ago there was a lot of talk about the 'Rich Kids of Instagram" who posted pictures of their things and their lives that made it seem to their followers as if they were much richer and much happier than their followers/ 

I did not have a problem with people like that. I thought their blogs weren't very interesting. A young girl invited me to follow her blog. It wasn't even a blog, just a photo study of her clothes. We do not live in the Victorian period when it was possible to tell by looking, at least at women's clothes, which ones were expensive because expensive women's clothes were so elaborate. I saw a girl who had some clothes. Her clothes had a mass-produced, modern, casual look. I supposed, when wailing about the Rich Kids of Instagram became a thing, that they might have been expensive designer-label bits and pieces, but I didn't recognize the labels. To me it looked like a kid letting her parents know she was still at school, though if her parents were like mine, I thought, they must have been disappointed that she wasn't writing anything about what she was studying or learning--only photographing her clothes. 

It never occurred to me that the girl's message to the world was "I can afford this, that, and the other expensive piece of clothing, and you can't." For one thing I used to be an expert on buying $200 outfits for under $10 from charity shops. For another thing the girl didn't look like me, so why would I have wanted to dress like her? 

Then I see and hear people saying things like "I don't want to be in a class, work, hang out, or whatever with that person. Person has sooo much more skill and experience." 

That's precisely the person I would want to know, if I had the opportunity. The person from whom I can learn something is the most interesting person, to me, in any crowd. This has been the way I've felt all my life, and it has led to some unpleasant complications about now. It means that my favorite people have nearly all been older than I am; now they're retiring, aging, and dying, and I'm not ready to think about any of those things. But I have learned a lot from people who were ahead of me on some learning path or other. Would I rather be in a poetry seminar with Margaret Atwood, or with the poor little old lady who sends a garbled gospel song to the weekly poetry page in the newspaper? Atwood, any day.

In college, it seemed obvious that one school friend, especially, was miles ahead of me in every possible way people's talents and achievements could be compared, one year. But she also made a couple of very bad choices I didn't make. The second year I started hearing that people thought I was a match for my brilliant, gifted, beautiful friend. Ten years later there was no question: I'd passed her. She had her way of looking good, and I had mine. She wrote her songs, and I wrote mine. She might have been born with a greater talent, but she spent much of her young adult life struggling with addictions while I was using the talents I had. 

And so? Life's road wound on and on. As a teenager I thought of writing and music as my talents. As a young adult I accepted the fact that my musical talent is amateur quality, carefully stored a dozen or so book manuscripts on the expectation that I'd be able to polish and publish them whenever I felt mature enough, and achieved Success as an entrepreneur. Now, after seventeen years of not replicating that success, who knows, maybe my brilliant addicted friend has passed me again. (I hope so; at least I hope she's more comfortable, financially, than I am, and I still think her songs should have been published at least on a web site.) As a once popular book title said: Success is never ending; failure is never final. We're mortal. We never do know everything.

One early lesson that served me well, though, is not to burden myself by wanting what other people have, or coveting it, or avoiding them because I don't have what they have. Not to cut myself off from the pleasure of working with them, though avoiding direct competition might be a good idea.

A "competition on looks" story comes to mind. 

One of my job descriptions, in my twenties, was "feminist activist." At the time Washington, DC, did not have a rape crisis center, and people felt a need for one. Advertisements for "singers, actresses, and models" all in one ad were a recognized way to recruit sales and fundraising teams without actually saying "Only young and pretty women need apply." In my twenties I found it profitable to bid on those gigs. So a mob of young and pretty women were hired to raise funds to build the rape crisis center, and given a fundraising quota for each day depending on the neighborhood we were canvassing. Every day everyone struggled to make quota...except a girl I'll call Patricia, because her real name was something different.

In a room full of professional pretty girls, Patricia stood out. Blue-eyed redheads aren't supposed to have classic bone structure. Patricia did. Women's hair is supposed to grow far enough to reach some point on our upper backs, and then stop. Patricia's bright red hair had never been cut and grew to about halfway down her thin thighs. Her waist tapered, too. Patricia had been homeschooled and had finished high school at sixteen. She was still sixteen, and had never even had acne. Patricia had been sent to Washington with nice clothes and a nice car. Clearly Patricia was a person destined to go through life being envied, by people who didn't see her as just existing on a different level from normal human beings, which I did.

Inevitably one day I was called in to the manager's office. "You barely made quota two nights last week, and didn't make quota last night. You've been making quota. What's wrong?"

I knew exactly what was wrong. "We've been canvassing a hostile neighborhood." 

"Well, Patricia's been in that neighborhood and she's been well above quota."

How could she? "Patricia is not a normal human being. Patricia is fabulous. People would pay Patricia to stand on their doorsteps and recite the multiplication table. That does not happen to the rest of us."

"Think so? Well, someone you talked to last night just called in to make a donation with a credit card. Quite a large donation. We know for sure it was you because she said she talked to the pretty one with the biggest, brownest eyes..."

It was a nice flattering pep talk. It did not change the facts. All of us were young and pretty. None of us could ever be Patricia except Patricia.

So the manager said, "Well, everyone's numbers are down, so tonight we'll pull them up again. It's Halloween, a special day for some of us, and we are going to Takoma Park." 

At the time I was living in Takoma Park. "Can my sister tag along with me?"

"I suppose so, since it's your neighborhood. Just for tonight."

This sister was the one who really wanted to be the feminist activist, the one who'd been sexually molested when she was eleven years old and looked fifteen. Now she was thirteen and looked old enough to vote. It was a problem. We knew men who were decent enough to try to resist, but we never met a male between the ages of nine and ninety who didn't react visibly to this sister. The other one got tired of being told she was cute, or pretty, or a good model for whatever, but for this one beauty was a real burden to bear, at the age when girls are obsessed with their looks. Anyway everyone in the neighborhood had noticed her; people were interested in her story.

So we walked around our neighborhood. It was not a typical door-to-door fundraising experience. Everyone wanted us to come in and sit down; everyone wanted to hear the sister's testimony. People who chose to live in Takoma Park were stereotypically generous anyway. 

Sister went to bed at her normal bedtime, it being a school night, and I went back downtown with the mob for what I considered the total waste of time where we all counted and re-counted everyone's take. 

Quota for Takoma Park was higher than usual: two hundred dollars. Nevertheless, nobody seemed to have had any trouble making quota. Patricia had as usual brought in several hundred dollars over quota. So, that night, had I.

"Well, somebody was listening to what I said this morning! Priscilla, tell us what you did!"

"I was with my sister. She wants this job. I vote we hire her."

I had not yet researched the implications for the group's liability insurance in allowing even Patricia, much less my sister, to run around the city talking to strangerrs about sexual assault every night. The manager clearly expected that I would. (Fun fact: one of the ways my odd jobs service kept costs low was that, as independent contractors, none of us bothered about insurance.) All I could think about, at the moment, was that something unique in the history of the world had happened. An ordinary human being had achieved a fundraising feat comparable with Patricia's. God had dropped a gift into the group's hands, and they were fumbling.

And Patricia's perfectly beautiful face curled into a, yes, an ugly sneer. "Tell your housemate we don't do baby-sitting." Could it be? It was. Phenomenal Patricia envied my sister.

I had to quit that gig next week, anyway, because typing was picking up. I expected to hear more of Patricia in a few years but, somewhat to my surprise, she has not become a movie star and I never did hear what she chose to do with her life.

I hope she saw the futility, as well as the evil, of envy.

The Bible doesn't say that it's anyone's duty to be or seem happy. The Bible writers presuppose that people want to feel happy, and often tell us things we can reasonably feel happy about, but it never says that happiness is a duty. Happiness is a pleasure. The Bible does command that people control one "feeling." That feeling is not lust--the Bible never tells single people not to enjoy sex fantasies for all they're worth, although that is partly because the Bible was written in a culture that allowed very few young people to stay single. It is not depression--the Bible never tells us to be like Jacob, who said "I will go to my grave mourning for my son," or not to be like Jacob; it leaves that up to us. It is not even fear--the Bible writers admit that there are things reasonable people want to avoid, although they also tell us we don't need to be afraid of Hell. The emotion the Bible commands us to avoid is envy. Bible writers note here and there that people have reasons to be sad, mad, or glad. And Hebrew words for those emotional states are active verbs; though understood to mean things like "(You will) be happy (about this)," they literally tell people "Rejoice! Sing! Shout! Dance!" Hebrew is a very lively language. "Weep! Wail! Tear your clothes with grief!" the Bible writers also advise people to do, in passng reactions to less pleasant news. But "Thou shalt not covet" is a commandment. Indulging in envious thoughts is a sin like lying or blaspheming, like adultery or murder. 

If we really think that what other people have are good things, we are never commanded not to work for similar things for ourselves. This applies to material things and also to talents and experience. Trying to be "smarter than" or "prettier than" someone else is a waste of time. Trying to use whatever talents we have, in their own right, without fretting about what other people have, is the ideal. 

This is starting to sound like a Sunday post, and it's not Sunday...but there's my answer to the Long & Short Reviews question. I wish for you, Gentle Readers, this happiness that I've found...from learning to enjoy, not envy, what others have.