Be excellent for each other

As a “cusper” approaching 40 who also was into, at various points in my life, surf culture, rave culture, and 80s rock music, I grew up with a love for the Bill and Ted films. So maybe it’s no surprise that the now famous quote “be excellent to each other” is one that I’ve repeated many times in my life.

In the first film, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, where the duo first discover the phone booth time machine and travel through time to collect notorious figures from our past to complete their high school history assignment, the quote first happens in a scene where Bill and Ted travel to the future and meet a council of leaders. They play a little air guitar as a greeting with the song “In Time” by Robbie Robb playing the background. The two then realize that the council of elders wants them to say something, and Ted tells Bill to make something up. What he comes up with is, “Be excellent to each other”.

We truly should be excellent to each other. When you first meet someone, with no other information to go on, you have no reason to treat them in any way other than with respect and compassion.

The older I get, the more I find it saddening how many people in this world go about their daily lives constantly stuck on autopilot; they seem lost to the whims of their thoughts and emotions and rarely appear to take the time to consider how their words or actions really impact the world around them. And I certainly am not free of guilt in such behavior either. It's challenging to rise above the drive to emotional reactivity. It takes work and, sadly, it's not something that we as a society value enough in our educational systems.

At a base level, we could all learn a bit more from something as simple as a tagline-gone-viral from a sci-fi comedy film from the late 1980s.

Being excellent to each other could be as simple as acknowledging each other, trying to be aware of each other’s needs (or going the extra step to asking what someone else needs to be or to feel better in their life), or even just taking a little time out of our day to do something for some other person without any thought or need for reciprocation.

We can and should be excellent to each other.

But something struck me about this phrase yesterday. I was writing an email to some colleagues and had begun writing the quote to end the email. Within the email, I had mentioned the recent devastating Marshall Fire here in Colorado and how many had lost their homes. For whatever reason, as I typed, the phrase that I wrote instead came out as “Let’s be excellent for each other”.

I think as I continue finding depth in my own meditation practice and spending time committed to some necessary introspective work, specifically in helping me to deal with some trauma imposed on my life by my relationship with my father, I find more and more how much taking the time to be excellent to myself makes it easier for me to be excellent to others. Time spent practicing mindfulness, for instance, makes it easier to catch myself when an emotional reaction attempts to drive me to anger or frustration and to instead respond in a more rational manner. There’s so much more that we can do for one another if we can take the little time to be excellent to ourselves.

Just as it’s so easy to judge others or to imagine what they’re thinking or feeling without asking, we often are far too quick to judge ourselves or to allow the autopilot of unfocused thinking to drive us into seeking easy rewards or to react bitterly to someone who had not intentionally attempted to harm us. What would happen to our society if we could all just be a little better to ourselves?

Yes, we should be excellent to each other. We could all take that line from Bill and Ted a little more whole-heartedly into our lives. But, just as you may have heard before that you have to learn to love yourself before you can truly love someone else, we really need to be excellent to ourselves if we want to make this world a place where we can more easily be excellent to each other.

Let's be excellent for each other.