There was a quote that was posted by one of the accounts I follow on Instagram.
It went like this:
"The Planet doesn't need more "successful" people.
The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers
& lovers of all kinds"
awwww... right?
Well I looked at it and something did not sit right with me.
"Successful"
With no mention of course, just an assumption of what this means. I would also think that because its in quotes it means "a particular idea of what is successful".
But it still did not sit right with me.
With words having more meaning and being more important these days, I did not appreciate the callousness of how this person used the word successful. With the only explanation being the "" quotations.
Not a big deal to someone who just reads it and doesn't think much about it.
Yeah, I get it, I know what they mean. But that is not enough, Especially now.
When ideas of Marxism, Fascism, Capitalism, Communism etc etc are resurfacing more than ever, this quote is more of a passive ignorant use of the word than encompassing precise, clever thought. Easily absorbed and people will think, yea I got it, I got what it meant.
But when common sense is not so common, not all people are going to get what it means and they will take it literally. Not everyone, but I'd assume if asked to define what they think the word "successful" means you will see the answers will vary a lot.
On the same note is this quote saying to those who can misinterpret this as : to be a peacemaker or healer etc is .... unsuccessful ?
What do they mean by "successful"? Not defining it can lead to vilifying the word, successful, itself.
Which would also tend to push that the ideal result is that its better to be ...unsuccessful.Are we aiming for low ambition, sedentary effort?
Well, my point is, I am pretty tired of words becoming vilified or somehow becoming wrong or evil or bad. When it comes down to it the origin of the word itself is really a positive description, a positive outcome. (a good result, a happy outcome)
Specifically by "successful" do they mean having a career/job and what kind of career? or finishing school or earning a living? Do they mean it is buying a house or having a car? It can be assumed to mean so much. And if this is the case, do they mean these persons with this success cannot be healers, peacemakers or lovers ?
Why all this fuss over this word and quote?
So I came up with an analogy, not a very great one and somewhat horrific but I think it makes sense:
Its like a knife that is used to cut tomatoes, a terrible person uses it to stab someone else.... a solution would be lets get rid of the knife! Yet the terrible person is still there and not dealt with and then maybe uses some other object to harm someone else. Similar solution, hey lets get rid of that object because now it has become harmful!
The easy and less effective way of dealing with this situation is to just get rid of everything around that person that they can use as a weapon. Yet the harder, more effective way of dealing with this situation is to deal with this person to begin with, why are they doing this, where have their intentions originated from etc, figure out why and how to change his intention. That takes some diving deep, and a lot of times ppl would rather do the former and try to ignore the bigger issue.
What this also does is the former affects more people than you think.... hey... now there is no knife to cut tomatoes and maybe now they have to be forced to use a spoon to cut a tomato or fork, now there is no bat to play baseball so they are forced to just play catch, now others who used them the way they were meant to be used will feel that it is taken away from them, their lives are altered and restricted because someone else used it in a bad way (even if it was just one person among many), this leads to resentment. And lets not forget the people that are still being physically hurt by this person who is still around and not dealt with, that problem does not go away. Everyone suffers. So lets stop vilifying words but correcting the meaning behind it. Redefine the use again to mean what it was meant for, something positive.
Stop throwing away babies out with the bathwater.
Lets redefine things to make them better, redefine the use, the meanings, the intentions, the beliefs, behind it. Instead of throwing away things that bad people have used wrongly. It is the use of the word by the person and the intentions and thoughts of that person that need to be changed, not the word itself. Why.... because if you do not fix the meaning associated with something or the intention of the person, you will just keep changing whatever word becomes associated with those intentions. You change the word, an new word will be used in the wrong way or used to mean something negative. The result is the problem will never go away, people will still be hurt, innocent people around will be affected, but the one person that needs to be dealt with and the intentions behind them will not be addressed.
Who is to say that our idea of success will not include the peacemakers, the healers, restorers, the storytellers and lovers of all kinds? Wouldn't be amazing if those are definitions of success too, words associated together in harmony with it? Sounds pretty successful to me!
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