Here: your permission to suck

If you don’t suck at anything. One of two things is happening.?

(A) You’ve lived (you are living) a boring life.?

(B) You haven’t asked yourself some hard questions about your capabilities.?

We are more likely to fall victim to the first one; never trying out many new things.

We stay with the tried and tested because we are not enthused about being exposed to our own ineptitude.?

We want to start a new hobby/project and master it immediately. This is ridiculous because no one has ever mastered anything just by starting it. We master stuff by sticking to them.

Yet as soon as we realize that mastering that new arcane skill (e.g keeping a house plant) is not a walk in the park, we abandon ship and move on. By doing this, we leave blank spots in our reality. Our entire life becomes, as that metropolitan philosopher Karen Rinaldi describes it, “surrounded by a space, we are too scared to enter.”

By abandoning and moving on, we save ourselves the constant confrontation with our own ineptitude. Yet by avoiding the vulnerability of living in the reality of a skill we can’t control, we soon become outdated and stiff.

We will suck at many things if we are to live a life with any measure of excitement.?

Yet that’s only one half of the story. It’s in sucking at stuff that we learn empathy.?

The other day, my boss told me that I lacked empathy. It was a work hangout and I was teaching another colleague how to swim. And doing a pretty bad job at it. At one point, I gruffly told her to keep her head in the water and lift her legs to the surface. It was then he turned back and told me in the most avuncular manner; "Gbenga, you lack empathy."?

It took a while to process what he had said, but I did after a while. Swimming had come naturally to me and it was hard to grasp that it couldn’t come naturally to other people. And so when my colleague thrashed wildly instead of gliding purposefully through the water, I couldn’t empathize. And by extension, I could not teach effectively. I was impatient. If I had continued, I probably would have ruined swimming for her entirely *gasp*.?

I have gotten better at teaching people to swim. I teach kids to swim in my old neighbourhood, and a few of them are doing well. But I still suck at teaching swimming. Yet, I am fine with that knowledge.?

To suck is to have perspective. To know how hard learning can be and be patient in imparting knowledge. To suck is to learn willpower. To persevere in our knowledge of our ineptitude is to learn peace, and self-awareness and understand that even when we are not perfect in this specific thing, we are still loved.?

We are not designed to be perfect. If we were, we wouldn’t need another person, a God or a concept of god. Imagine what assholes we’d be.?

So yes; here is your permission to suck.?

Photo by?Brian Suman?on?Unsplash