This is restated a ton of different ways, I found out. Some are old-timey maxims from grandparents, while others are rap lyrics. "Same people you misuse on your way up, you might meet on your way down" to "Started from the bottom, now we're here" kind of stuff. And keep in mind, having nothing or having everything are very relative terms. But the general point still stands. What we do with what we have (or don't have) matters.
Plenty of people know about the movie, Gladiator. It did win Best Picture in 2001, so, yeah, go figure. Surprisingly less people know that it had some actual characters from history. But I don't want to talk about Russel Crowe's character, Maximus Decimus Meridus (I should though, people would read a blog post about a vengeful gladiator). No, I want to mention the guy played by Richard Harris. The character was Marcus Aurelius, who in real life was the Roman emperor from the years 161-180. The whole thing from before about what how we react to having nothing or everything, that's attributed to him. There's a story about him, that he had a servant follow him around, everywhere he went, for a particular reason. Anytime someone gave praise to Marcus, for whatever huge or small thing, this servant would lean in and whisper to Marcus Aurelius, "You're just a man." First of all, awesome job to have. I wonder what the application for that must have been like. But second, such an important thing to be humble with that level of power.
Here's a sculpture of Mr. Aurelius, looking like his bad self:
Funny thing about it, we're usually very interested in humbling the man at the top, who has everything. In my opinion, we're much more accustomed to shrugging off those of us that have nothing. Those of us that, some might even say, are nothing. Despite the fact that there are way more of us out there who are and/or have nothing, that could be infinitely higher and may bring more to the world. Those of us in squalor, in filth, on the very bottom, with little to fight for and even less to fight with, those are the people who need to hear it just as much: you're just a man. You are not an animal, you are not a monster, you are not a screw-up, a waste, an obligation, a douchebag with no future of non-douchebagery. You are just a man, or woman.
And don't get me wrong, maybe you are, and maybe you aren't all of those things, because frankly, we're probably all those things at individual moments, but we don't have to be for our entire lives. It doesn't have to define us... necessarily. I should put an asterisk here, because some us are capable of great things, and we should definitely get credit for them. Others will do terrible, really awful shit that we shouldn't get to just brush off because it's inconvenient to us.
But perhaps the great majority of us should have someone who always is in our ear, reminding us that we are just human. You snag the winning touchdown in a backyard game a football? "You're just a man." But then you drop out of college and get a dead end job at a factory? "You're just a man." But you work your way up and become the best supervisor they've ever had? "You're just a man." Ooh, but you dropped your coffee in the car and knocked down a telephone pole. "You're just a man." But then you saved a family of Korean immigrants in the next car who were about to all be killed from an explosion? "You're just a man". The cops found weed and cocaine in the car you were driving? "You're just a man. Whose under arrest for felony possession." But it comes out the drugs were planted on you, and you take down a bunch of corrupt cops and get a key to the city from the mayor and... I don't know why I'm still going with this, sorry.
As per usual, I have a story to back up my theme of this post. But for once, not my own. I'm going to tell you a quick story about someone who I don't think would tell their own story quite this way. And I don't have to worry about not saying his name, because I didn't actually meet the guy, but I was present for what I have to believe was both a huge high and a sequence of lows that followed. Here's what happened:
A few years ago, Tara and I were coming back from Greece where we spent our Honeymoon. It was an amazing 2 weeks at 2 different islands, and had amazing pictures, and all these fun trips we'd taken, and we had tour guides in a few spots, and the food was outstanding everywhere. But at 2 weeks, it was time to come home and we were ready to be done traveling. And getting back from Greece is, to put it mildly, a huge pain in the ass.
We had to fly into Athens at like 11PM and stay overnight, because there was not going to be another flight into Athens in time for our 6AM flight to Amsterdam. So, we camped out in a hallway in the airport in Athens. I think Tara got a few hours of rest, whereas I didn't sleep at all. Then we get on the flight to Amsterdam, in which I did my best to rest but didn't, and had a slight layover there before flying to Atlanta. Now, I definitely got a few hours of rest going to Atlanta, but I got kind of jostled a few times from the guy sitting behind me on the flight. I got clocked in the head a few times by his elbow or something else, so I kept waiting for him to do it again, and I was now not only exhausted from traveling but much more irritable than I might otherwise be.
With that in mind, we get into Atlanta, and our flight out gets delayed. There was this huge nasty storm that had just come through the are, but we were flying in the direction that the storm was traveling, so we had to wait for it to clear out. And we were in a terminal that was under construction, and the flight was overbooked, and there was a huge crowd of people in the same boat, all trying to get on this flight, all crammed in the same area, and all seemingly just pissed off from having been in transit for hours and hours with little sleep or food.
With that in mind, Tara and I are just standing there in the middle of this crowd. And it just so happens there is this large group of about 20-30 Irish nursing students trying to get on the flight with us. They are all really cute, they are all petite or petite-ish, and stylishly dressed, and there are a bunch of little groups of them but it's apparent that they're all there together. Also in the immediate vicinity is an incredibly goofy looking individual that I'm going to call Marvin for the purpose of this story. I don't know what his name actually is, but damn if he didn't look like Marvin.
So Marvin, to set the picture up right, is about 5'6, husky but not fat, with the Chili Bowl haircut, wearing a conspicuously strange t shirt, it had some item on it like 'television' or 'radio', something that you would never expect needed to make a t-shirt for in the first place. Almost like the only reason you would wear it was because you didn't know what t-shirts usually had on them, and you chose the weirdest possible one but no one ever said anything about it. He had rainbow colored tube socks and painfully white shoes as well. And you're probably wondering why I remember all of this, and honestly, I kinda wonder that too. I'm telling you, this guy just stuck out that much, I had to take a mental image that I can't just delete after all this time. It was like the 80's were in the seat next to him on the previous flight and threw up on him when the vomit bag wasn't there.
Now, again, I'm sleep deprived, I'm hungry, and I'm annoyed at the travel delay. So I'm not in a great mood, and neither is Tara, so we're both just standing there, waiting for our tickets, not really listening but just kind of hearing things around us. And we both hear what I was sure is the absolute worst pickup line of all time:
"Hey, can I ask you guys a question? Do you think I should get my eyebrows waxed?"
...
So I could tell from the voice that it was Marvin, and Tara knew I heard the same thing she did, so she gives me a light slap on my shoulder as she says, "Don't look." Because I was totally going to look. I was going to give one of those, "The fuck you just say?" type looks. And I basically did anyway a few seconds later. But I'm sorry, did he just fucking say that? All the ice breakers in the world, all the way you can start a conversation, and THAT was your top choice? What didn't make the cut? Inquiring about which anal lubricant is best for giving colonics? But that was what Marvin went with, that was what he decided to use to start a conversation with two very attractive 20-something sporty Irishwomen. Imagine the cajones that must have taken.
So you could imagine my surprise when the aforementioned crater of a pickup attempt netted an actual conversation. Not just a quick response of something like "uhhh, sure I guess." No, these two actually engaged what he said, and mentioned a few male friends they had that did something similar. And they mentioned some trends in fashion that supported him thinking of his body and his style in a different way. It was a surprisingly compelling conversation, and he had a decent thing going. I was impressed, and so was Tara. We sat there and listened to a good 5 minutes of this guy pull a damn clutch move.
And then, it seems that time caught up with him. Because the conversation ended. There was just a lull in the interaction, and any normal man would have understood that they needed to either have a normal kind of next step, or to just accept that the moment had passed, and to move on. And that was almost what Marvin did, because he did make real attempts at making a normal conversation happen, but it went a little bit like this:
Marvin: So what kind of work do you guys do?
Irish student: We are all in the same nursing class, we have a trip for the next month and a half for the end of our program (it was something like that, I don't remember that part anymore)
Marvin: Oh, that's cool. You should let me develop a website for your group so you can get good exposure. I would just need your contact information.
I got another shoulder slap not to turn around when that one came out, because it was the worst of a few real attempts for him to turn a hell of a ice breaker conversion into what I can only assume he thought would be a sex filled summer fling with way too many slutty nurses. And I'm not calling them slutty, because none of them necessarily gave off that vibe, but I somehow think the concept of what Marvin was pushing toward involved copious amounts of no-strings-attached sex for this random of all random dudes. I know, I know, I totally judged Marvin in this way. Get past it.
Also, we were not the only ones to notice this conversation go south. Other passengers in ear shot made eye contact with me when I started giving off the looks of, "I'm uncomfortable, and this shit isn't even happening to me". I came close to turning around again, and trying to put a verbal stop to it. Just, literally waving my hand in the air and saying something like, "Dude, it's over. You have to stop this. Please don't creep them out anymore than they already are, this is not going to get any better."
There was no real climactic end to this. I didn't look to see if he actually walked away on his own accord or if the girls found a way to slink away or even other nurses helped them find another spot to stand for what ended up being another 30 minutes. But that was about as uncomfortable as you can think to just sit there and try to replay what you've done. It's not even like I would have known what to say to someone that experienced such a range of success and failure in a small amount of time. But maybe he didn't need anyone to give him a proper recap of this experience. Maybe he only truly needed someone there to say that they understood what he was trying to do, and they still were rooting for him in his never-ending quest to overcome those damn socks (for real, it was a PROBLEM). He could have used pointers, he could have used encouragement, he could have really benefited from just a hug and a different shirt with some sweat pants to cover most of what was going on there. Or perhaps, the best thing to give him, in the depths he had found in the Atlanta airport, was just a dude, who could lean over and whisper in his ear, "You're just a man....
"You are just a man...
"Now get your shit together, dude, you look like the smaller kid from Stranger Things."
Bye Bye.
