Thursday Thought – What Makes Someone “Great?”

I’m watching this series on Netflix now about genetic engineering (talk about VeRRRRRRRYYY scAAAAAARRRRRY!); if you haven’t watched any o f it, there is a mother who has a child who is losing his vision because of a congenital condition passed down from both father and mother (I won’t go into all the details here). The mother, saying her son wants to be an astronaut and work for NASA and THAT HE ALWAYS DOES WHAT HE WANTS (this kid looks to be around 9 or 10?) sobs when she says he cannot do so because he doesn’t have the required 20/20 vision. I can see where this is headed given the “theme” of this series.

This led me to think about all of those of us with chronic illness and just people with “problems” in general. Would we REALLY be better off if we could inject something in our eyes to see again? Would we REALLY be better simply finding the obvious short-term solution without understanding the long-term implications of that “solution?”

I am not going to discuss morality or the many dangerous repercussions such “bioengineering” or “bio-hacking” would have not just on individuals but the planet as a whole. Rather, I am interested in thinking about what makes a person “strong,” what makes a person SUCCEED in life. Basically, if I had to sum it all up “succinctly,” I would say that what makes a person “great” insofar as doing amazing things for himself or herself or for humanity or for the planet is not taking the shortcuts, but learning to ACCEPT his or her limitations and to find new ways to get to the same end goal he or she “was” always after. That is, ultimately, how we learn as humans. I realize it can be argued that we can “learn” by taking the insinuated “shortcut” here, but doing so is one of those psychological “glitches” we have again; we want to be “fixed” NOW; we don’t think about how severe the impact might be down the line. That’s not a “bad” thing – that’s simply part of our psychology. However, to “learn” your mistakes retrospectively by seeing the severe consequences and somehow trying to undo those things (which most of the time cannot be undone) is a very different learning than the learning that comes from accepting an obstacle and finding ways to overcome that obstacle on your own. I hope that is at all coherent (I am just getting home from my first Halloween party and it has been an EXHAUSTING couple of weeks).

At any rate, I hope you are all having a wonderfully happy and healthy day, wherever you are in the world! I really would like to hear from you – what do you think about taking “shortcuts” versus utilizing human ingenuity? If you think of the people you would consider “great,” what qualities make you define them in such a way? It’s an interesting line of thought with MANY subsequent lines of question.

I hope you are all having a LOVELY Halloween time of the year – it is certainly one of my favorites! I will have to get some photos up here as well! It’s a FUN time of the year – please have SOME fun, even if it’s just watching scary movies or listening to Dracula as an audiobook (I had to do that one fall when I incurred a VERY severe concussion … let me tell you, that audiobook actually kept me up at night!) – whatever you can do to bring just a little bit more happiness into your life, please do it! Thanks for reading, as always!


❤ Always, Beth