Random Thoughts-76
March 8, 2010
I read a quote from Buzz Aldrin the other day. You may remember Buzz as the second man to set foot on the moon. Buzz says there’s nothing wrong with being second. He says the world is obsessed with being number one. Okay. Easy for him to say. He was the second man on the MOON! Not the first runner up at a beauty pageant! Who are you going to remember?
But he does make a point, doesn’t he? I was reading an old People magazine that was declaring Johnny Depp as the sexiest man alive in 2009. Really? Who said? Where was the voting station? If they are going to pick one man out of 6.8 BILLION people I think we are all entitled to a vote, don’t you? Not that I don’t like Johnny Depp, or anything, but it seems a little presumptuous for the editors of a magazine to just pick someone as our sexiest male human.
It does catch your eye at the check-out counter at the grocery store, though, doesn’t it? It makes for interesting reading and it obviously sells magazines.
Sexiest Man, Best Actress, Most Valuable Player… Humans do like to crown their kings and queens, don’t they? It seems a shame, at times, that it creates so few winners and so many losers.
But that’s human nature. We’re competitive. We want to be better than others. Thank God we are or we’d probably still be living in caves or something.
However, maybe it’s because I have never won a Gold Medal or an MVP or even came remotely close to being nominated for the Sexiest Man Alive competition but there really is something to be said for those who don’t finish first. Something to be said for pursuing excellence even if one falls short of the grand prize. That’s what I think Buzz Aldrin is really saying. You don’t always have to be first to accomplish something.
Pierre Fedy, Baron de Coubertin, the creator of the modern Olympic Games stated, “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle," he would later say. "The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well."