This Is Me
We all had heroes growing up, right?
It doesn’t matter whether they were clad in tights wielding animal shaped gadgetry or chasing each other around a field in shorts kicking a ball or hopping about in a space suit exploring realms most only dream of, they became objects of admiration and inspiration for our young minds. They were our heroes, they were winners that motivated us. If they ever got beaten they bounced back ten times as strong and I believe this helped to teach me that failures should always be viewed as opportunities for growth.
In my seven-year-old mind I was confident that at least a few years of my adult life would be spent working as the local super hero, an astronaut, the world’s best wrestler, a robot, Bruce Lee, a lion and a myriad of other interesting occupations. Thankfully, a little bit of imagination allowed me to work a few of those jobs without actually dishing out vigilante justice on the streets of Sutton Coldfield. I’d draw, write and tell stories living every day as an adventure and irritating my older brothers spectacularly in the process.
In my twenty-four-year-old mind I am confident that many of the life-goals my younger self had set were simply unreasonable. As I got older I started to lose faith in my heroes and my plans began to change; perhaps because I saw quite clearly that they weren’t as brilliant as my crazy undeveloped little brain might have believed. I mean, being crammed inside a space shuttle with a bunch of other people travelling at 17,500 miles per hour sounds completely horrifying to my adult-ish mind and I wouldn’t say throwing myself around a wrestling ring is any more attractive.
However, it is important to remain inspired and motivated.
I would have to say that inspiration and motivation are much more available to me now than ever before, without the need for such imagination. It is possible to find inspiration in the most simple of things from the architecture of a house roof to the inner workings of a teabag, let’s take the humble cheese-ploughman’s sandwich from a supermarket as an example.
The ingredients of this sandwich are: bread, butter, cheese, pickle, lettuce, tomato, red onion and cucumber. So to begin, the bread has been turned from yeast, flour, salt and water in to a loaf of fresh warm bread at a bakery. The butter has been churned from cow’s milk and the cheese has been prepared and sat maturing for a couple of months in a “cave”. The pickle has been made using various diced vegetables and vinegars from a variety of sources and the fresh salad items have been grown, picked, washed and delivered. These ingredients are all sliced, spread and stacked to form sandwiches that are packaged into plastic or cardboard sheaths ready to be distributed.
The largest sandwich distributor in the UK gets through around 300,000 loaves of bread each week, that’s half a million sandwiches every single day. There are literally thousands of people working on a production line to bring relatively fresh, convenient lunch-time food to other non-sandwich-making people. They are the real heroes.
The sheer scale and complexity of the processes that bring to existence the supermarket sandwich make me wonder what humans could be capable of; what I could be capable of. You can find a certain beauty in the outwardly mundane that is only apparent when you look for it, whilst each individual contributor may not feel that they have an impact the collaboration between so many minds contributes to the “bigger picture”.
It reminds me of the Great Pyramids of Giza; 5000 years ago Ancient Egyptian people spent twenty years, and used two-million bricks, building an enormous pyramid that still stands today. Their culture and ways of life may have been lost for millennia but the pyramids they left behind have stood throughout. The important thing is that I still have heroes to motivate me, they just take a different form these days, not a pair of tights in sight.
Inspiration is all around us, you just have to look.
