On Kicking Rocks and Bruising Butts

I’m a Bible college dropout with an unsatisfied fetish for the well-turned phrase. This blog is my attempt to hurl myself into the gaping maw of the existential abyss we call the internet and pray that at least a few scraps of me make it back into daylight. If lines like that aren’t too stilted or heavy-handed for you, maybe some part of me might affect some part of you (hopefully for the better) should you stick around.

Today’s thought is about humility.

I am often humbled by my mental health. Sometimes by how little I know about relationships, despite believing I’m more socially aware than most men. Often by poverty — which, in America, looks like a whiny fifty-year-old man complaining about his high-tech business while typing a blog post on his third smartphone, sitting comfortably in central heating and air, in front of a widescreen TV, with two prescription-fed cats in his lap. But hey, the couch is secondhand and I fit a government profile. So this must be what suffering feels like, right? Sure, even the homeless have TikTok pages, but that’s not the kind of humility on my mind tonight.

The humility of failure — big or small — unites the rich and the poor, the first-world and the developing world. Whether you’re trying to become the first man to die on Mars and your rockets keep exploding in full view of humanity, or you’re trying to kick a rock farther than the other starving boy in the village who somehow has all the athletic talent, and you whiff-kick yourself straight into a bruised tailbone… every one of us has had to haul our proverbial backsides up from the dirt and try again at being somebody.

I have ambitions big enough to end scarcity the world over and make humanity an interplanetary species — more than that, pioneers of the farthest reaches of the universe. If God and the cosmos are on my side, much of this could even happen during my lifetime. And yet today I was defeated by a half-page flyer. My ADHD turned finishing an already 99% complete bit of advertising into an insurmountable task. So I procrastinated and wrote this post instead, which I suppose is exactly what any author worth his salt would do.

I’ll end this short thought by encouraging you to keep picking yourself up, dusting off your bruises, and giving it another go. One day you just might get what you want — and besides, that rock won’t kick itself.