Gordon W. Gahan: Star's Daughter (Eleventh -- End of Set):
"I am interested in becoming a good actress, not a movie star.
If I happen to become a star, too,
I'd love every minute of it, of course.
But my first goal is to become a competent actress." (1964-65)

"It's by the Grace of something far less than any of us that we ever manage to succeed."

Competence has always been overrated. Most of the best that has ever been accomplished has been achieved by those who have yet to be fully qualified to produce such works. The writer, who was considered unpublishable until she squeezed out that best seller. The artist who lived in an unheated garret through most of his life and whose oeuvre now graces The Louvre. We're all of us essentially Bozos on this bus, and, for sure, always were.

It's not that we haven't tried to create effective certification programs; they're over-enrolled. It's more like we're chasing a moving target propelled just that much faster than we could ever muster. By the time anyone graduates, the profession's moved on into loftier reaches. There's never really any likelihood of fully catching up, so we make do. We make considerably more than just do, but the formula for our successes never seems to quite add up. The more humble of us declare how fortunate we feel for the opportunities we've received to make a genuine public fool of ourselves, though we somehow, through the Grace of something, didn't. We muddled through somehow, the most acclaimed, perhaps, the most cognizant of their own abiding incompetence. Just lucky, I guess.

I understand the obsession to gain competence, though. It seems a necessary road. Nobody but politicians, it seems, ever get selected expressly for their lack of certifications. The rest of us seek confirmation of our genius before we start plying our trades. We seek permission to practice what can ultimately only be successfully practiced through self-certification. Even the unlucky scholar who took top honors will eventually be faced with tugging themself up by their own meager bootstraps to produce anything in practice. And even that scholar will not remember half of what they'd tried to absorb when cramming for their final exams. They will instead do what they can with what stuck to become the very soul of lingering incompetence.

The tragedy comes from continuing to seek competence long after it might have become obvious that nobody's ever achieved it. Those of us who've longed for wisdom that was probably not even imparted by age might have long ago tumbled to a conclusion that was always more worthy of us and our world. We chase chimeras, and we exclusively unnecessarily chase them. We suffer from cases of The Lake Woebegone Syndrome, where we firmly believe that all our children need to be above average when that never could realistically be. Though I never have, I ache to feel as though I was well-prepared to start anything in this world. It seems silly that even at my advanced age, I hold on to such a notion that's never once proven necessary for me to achieve any semblance of success. Of course, every outcome could have been better, and doubtless, had I somehow been better prepared, I might have accomplished so much more, but this kind of thinking seems to contribute nothing more than to the net volume of misery in this world.

I can always make myself more miserable in lieu of receiving what I've convinced myself I needed. I have always been a walking shortfall, a sincere disappointment, a bumbler second-grade, but only because I could never quite muster the gumption to become anyone's first-class bumbler, not even my own. I was always short a part of every dowry, never quite qualified to even compete for that scholarship, never in ten thousand lifetimes, capable of piloting any rocketships. I could have been a postal worker like my father, except I couldn't imagine ever passing that requisite ever-so-daunting civil service exam. I chickened out and sought an alternate career in incompetence. It's a growing field with ample openings, though nobody's ever fully qualified to fulfill even the least of those positions. It's by the Grace of something far less than any of us that we ever manage to succeed.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz