Universal Awesomeness
You are awesome. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. No matter where you are in your life, no matter what you’re doing right now, you are amazingly, brilliantly, superhero-level awesome, and you have amazing shit to share with the world.
And you know what else? There are not a limited number of awesome spots in the world. We’re not all waiting in line for a limited-run awesome train. It’s not a competition or a race, and awesomeness isn’t something shared by a special few people on this great wide world and the ‘verse beyond. There’s plenty of awesome to go around. Heck, it doesn’t even need to do that – we’ve all got it. We are all inherently awesome.
But we don’t always remember that.
You know the book Oh, The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss? A frequent gift to graduates and to people making their way in the world, that. It’s a brilliant, beautiful story about blazing your own path through life, about possibilities and being, well, awesome.
But for as much as it’s distributed, as much as it’s shared, it seems that oftentimes the message gets lost. We encourage those around us to follow our hearts, but are less than supportive when they do so in an unconventional way.
Take, for example, this amazing reading of Oh, The Places You’ll Go by a tribe of folks from Burning Man:
If you skipped the video because you know the story, please go back and watch it. It’s magical.
When my mom gave me that book when I graduated high school, I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean “drop out of college, get a tattoo, start dating women, dye your hair every color of the rainbow, jump off the corporate ladder, become self-employed, and move to Buffalo”. Not that she’s ever been anything less than supportive, mind you – but I’d bet a buck that this is not the sort of awesome she had in mind.
Whether they are your “competition”, Burners with rainbow hair, those sad and cranky people you encounter, folks who are weird to your eye, or those whose body type, lifestyle, or other thing you disagree with, whether you’re afraid for them or just plain uncertain, please remember that we all have our own paths to follow, our own dreams to chase. Our own visions of beauty. Our own definitions of success. Other people are awesome too. Assume universal awesomeness.
Image by Samantha Carlson (CC BY) via Flickr.
