Apart from eating, drinking and sleeping, what can you look back and say you've done “all your life”? (Serendipity Bible 10th Anniversary Edition, page 882).
The
easy and most universal and consistent answer to this question is
that throughout my life I have been imperfect. After that, a
persistent blindness and an inability to see things in perspective
follows closely. But tonight I would like to discuss a third
persistent feature of my life – the feeling of estrangement and
being left out of “in-groups.” The in-groups listing would be
long and would include everything from friendship groups, to high
school cliques, to brilliant honor roll students, to Ivy League
universities, to college instructors, to a long list of professionals
and their professions, to the hard sciences, to the connoisseurs of
art, music, fine cuisine, esoteric philosophy, the political elite,
people of power and practical affairs, elected officials, rock stars,
people with egregious talents, and perhaps the most perverse of all,
feeling left out of the company of neurotic and prolific geniuses,
and even of the degenerate, rebellious and counter-cultural. Any
assets and accomplishments that I might have too often have seemed
woefully ordinary and nondescript – deserving to be totally
discounted and shunned.
I
would love to say this is something that I have completely outgrown.
But the tug of envy within my innermost soul even yet occasionally
makes itself felt. I have lived to see many of those that I envied
crash and burn in their own lives. But curiosity combined with a lust
for power, influence, and the desire to be different (special) are
deeply ingrained within my character. I continue to sometimes yearn
for the smugness that comes from being safely above the entirely
dismissible, deplorably average, and depressingly ordinary. In short,
being among the nondescript “salt of the earth” has few
provisions to satisfy my persistent hungry for distinction even if
met through Faustian deals with darkness.
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