Perfect Score

My brother, T, messaged earlier in the week and said that he would come around for dinner, and so at about 6:15 this evening he turned up. Together we had a little bit of a poke around the house and he said some nice things about the progress I was making. He also ordered dinner and so I got a lamb dansak, the best kind of lamb dansak, the dansak which is free and eaten with your younger brother.

What’s really crazy is that T is just three years away from retirement. He joined the police force when he was, I guess, in his very early 20s and has to do 25 years to get to full pension. But he’s now just three years away from that milestone. And it is with no insignificant chagrin I think to myself, gosh, I’m looking down the barrel of another twenty years of work and he’s just about ready to stop.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, I quite enjoy working and the time that I spend with other people and I feel I have enough time around work most of the time. But it’s still a bit of an eye opener to realise that somebody else’s life path could be so different. We talked a little bit about one of my daughters is having a hard time at the moment, especially because of social media and maybe everybody’s having a hard time because of social media right now. It really makes it very difficult to feel good about yourself or to feel positive.

I am a pretty regular looking person. And I’m not in the best shape and I’ve got a pretty normal job and pretty normal friends, and I live in a pretty normal town. And none of these things are especially exciting when you contrast them with the fabulously good looking, excellent shape, incredible job, wonderful business. Like there’s nothing you can’t find someone else doing better than you on the Internet. Nothing.

There’s a clip doing the rounds at the moment of a Chinese gymnast receiving a perfect score on the parallel bars. And to give him credit he’s obviously worked incredibly hard for most of his life to achieve the control over his body he clearly has. It’s just unbelievable. Uh, the way he performs the exercise, the way he moves, the fluidity. It probably deserved the score he got. I understand it is, in part, remarkable because in gymnastics there is this a sort of unwritten rule where you can’t give a perfect score because you can always do better. But clearly on this occasion, at least one of the judges went, “no, I absolutely can give a perfect score”. It’s fine.

But how do all the other gymnasts feel? How does it feel to be someone who is almost as good but not quite as good? I think if you’re very mature and confident, then you can celebrate the success of others without feeling your own success is diminished or affected in any way. But I also think most people aren’t that secure and confident. There are some that are sure, but many people, myself included, worry a little bit about how how other people see us or whether or not we’re wasting our time and how well we’re investing our effort and so, yeah, maybe take a moment just to reflect on the other gymnasts who’ve also given nearly all of their lives and have also achieved incredible control over their bodies but aren’t quite as good as that guy.

We do like superlatives. I like superlatives. But there is a lot to be said for the regular for the normal. For the life I am actually living, rather than the life I might want to live after spending a bit too much time watching videos on the Internet.