SoCS 11-12-22- Pursuit of Excellence

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “starts with or contains ‘cel.’” Find a word that begins with or contains “cel” and use it in your post any way you’d like. Have fun!

“Excellent!”
Have you ever watched a child’s face light up when you say that? That reaction is also an excellent outcome. It’s heartwarming!

That word is not synonymous with perfect, though. Perfect doesn’t actually exist in our everyday lives. It’s a unicorn; great to imagine but impossible to own. But “excellent” does absolutely exist.

Excellent is a worthy goal and looks different in every situation. Doing your best is excellent. Making even a tiny improvement is excellent. It seems that excellent can be a direction to move toward as often as an outcome. But excellent things rarely “pop” out of nowhere. They’re pursued. And in order to appreciate any “excellent” event we need to also know being disheartened and disappointed. Everything is relative.

I personally dislike complaining. And it just occurred to me that people who complain a lot may have unrealistic expectations of achieving excellence. Do we feed that attitude in kids? Are we so eager to see their glowing faces that we dish out the “that’s excellent!” praise too often? I can’t help thinking that we’re giving a terrible burden to kids when we do that. People who complain about everything are visibly miserable and while they are complaining, “hope” is nowhere to be found. Besides Love, Hope is an essential part of life. It gives you courage to “try again” and to persevere. Without it, ‘giving up’ is almost a sure thing.

That brings me to something I have pondered for a while. My parents’ and grandparents’ generations experienced The Great Depression and two World Wars. I was fortunate to know my grandparents and listened to their tales about ‘difficult times’. Why weren’t drug abuse, suicide, frantic outrage, and ‘safe spaces’ big deals then? Do modern day kids think struggling is something new? I think so. In fact, I don’t think modern day kids even recognize what ‘struggling’-real human despair- is.

Here’s a recommended topic of discussion with your kids and grandkids. As all things are relative, ask them to put down their $200.00 devices and chew on this:

“While rates of extreme poverty have declined substantially, falling from 36 percent in 1990, the report’s expanded examination of the nature of poverty demonstrates the magnitude of the challenge in eradicating it. Over 1.9 billion people, or 26.2 percent of the world’s population, were living on less than $3.20 per day in 2015. Close to 46 percent of the world’s population was living on less than $5.50 a day. “

And once you get their attention, watching this video together might give them an idea how to help out their fellow man. Wouldn’t that be excellent?!