I have no ambition. And I used to view this as a virtue. Ambition to me was some dark force that sauntered hand in hand with arrogance through the evil places of the world. And I think this view was in part arrived at due to a play I saw in my impressionable youth. A play put on by my sister’s 6th grade class, taught by my dad, in which Caesar was called ambitious by the narrator, prompting a chanted chorus of students yelling, ‘Caesar was ambitious, Caesar was ambitious!’ The implication naturally being that Caesar’s ambition was ultimately the cause for his downfall. And so to avoid all possibilities of a downfall, I erased ambition from my list of desirables.
However, it’s recently come to my attention that maybe ambition is a good thing. Not the sort of ambition whereby you trample lesser beings to reach your goals and the ends justify the means. Not that sort of ambition. Instead a sort of ambition whereby you have goals. Aye. There’s the rub. Else we’re just going through the motions. And who wants that? Everybody wants some higher purpose. Some ‘reason.’ Well fine. I don’t have the goals yet, but I shall have the ambition. No more will I drift from interest to interest, devoting myself to nothing. Now I shall single-mindedly pursue what will soon be my ultimate goal of the total domination of the world. And so be it if one day, on the Senate floor, you surround me all in your togas on the Ides of March, and close in on me. And I’ll look at you, yes you, who were so close to me and whom I loved, and I’ll say, with a tear in my eye…
‘Et tu Brute?’ .
2 comments:
“When Ambition is your God, the office is your temple, the employee handbook your holy book. The sacred drink, coffee, is imbibed five times a day. When you worship Ambition, there is no Sabbath, no day of rest. Every day, you rise early and kneel before the God Ambition, facing in the direction of your PC. You pray alone, always alone, even though others may be present. Ambition is a vengeful God. He will smite those who fail to worship faithfully, but that is nothing compared to what He has in store for the faithful. They suffer the worst fate of all. For it is only when they are old and tired, entombed in the corner office, that the realization hits like a Biblical thunderclap. The God Ambition is a false God and always has been.” ~ Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss”
So what you're trying to say is that I was wrong yeah? 'A pox on Ambition' is to be the party stance? K. Fine. I can go with that. Bit of a hard line, but that's fine.
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