COMMEN MEN

When I have heard about the nobility of the common man, and it is a thing I have heard often across the years, I have always had a bit of a pause at the suggestion, for I find nothing noble about the common man. I believe his nobility is a rumor started and nurtured by those who require a mass of common men around them, for without such men there are no UNcommon men. A king in a realm alone is both king and subject. Only when a subject apart from himself is admitted to the room can the man who would be king claim his throne. So it profits the king to elevate the common man, to recommend to all at a cross roads that it is a noble state of being and that it is a condition to be celebrated by all who are willing to embrace the distinction.

But for myself...there is no excuse to exist if there is nothing to be produced by my life but repetition of deeds done by countless other men, thoughts held by legions before me, contributions of no consequence, words that changed nothing and persuasions that brought no profit to anyone but myself. If there is nothing I can uncover, nothing I can turn back, nothing I can alter nor any single thing is changed by my time spent here, then there is no point I can find in having dallied even for so long as I have.

To be an uncommon man...this is the ambition you speak so lightly, but which has consumed me throughout my life. I simply MUST make some difference or there will never have been justification for the breath I've drawn. I view it as an obligation born to every man who enters the realm of human beings. Of a million who surrender all the days of their lives in that quest, perhaps a thousand alter some meaningful small thing. Of that thousand perhaps a hundred succeed in justifying their existence by some act or some thought they will to humanity which helps to guide the direction of the vast and countless sea of mediocre men. And of these there may be one among that million who is called Beethoven or Ford or Franklin or Einstein.

The full measure of a man's life cannot be accurately taken until his death, and frequently it happens that not even then the value of his contribution is acknowledged. Often, a lifetime or two may pass before the world catches up to the vision of an extraordinary man and the kiss of immortality graces his name.

Because that is so, a man cannot allow himself to be demoralized by the lack of progress along the road to an uncommon existence. Many such men die believing their visions were futile, that they changed nothing. The lasting result never comes to fullness except in the course of time. So it is not the celebrity a man enjoys during his days on earth that justify the space he has taken up on the planet -- it is simply that he tried, that his life was exhausted in the pursuit of dreams he alone conjured from his own unique humanity.

Praise be to sheep everywhere who graze on the hillside mindless of things to come, who sit on the banks of rivers across the world fishing for pleasure, who have been taught by UNcommon men there is a certain nobility in counting for nothing. Without them there would be no point in the service uncommon men provide. But I know my place in that equation. It may be to fail in an endless quest to do otherwise, and that will be fine, for it is not achievement that drives my life, but the purpose I find within the effort to reach it. And that, as you eloquently quantify it, is, simply, to be an uncommon man.