eThoughts : On Being Incompetent: What’s our Definition?

Did you ever wonder about those days (or weeks, months, years, decades…) in which we cannot seem to assimilate information correctly and/or we cannot seem to contribute a darn thing (I’m using polite language) that has any merit to anything or anybody?

When it happens to me, it seems like I’m an incompetent acrobat dancing around on some narrow tightrope stretched thin over a daunting precipice. Of course we all know that most disasters are the result of a chain of mistakes, overlooked or otherwise. So, I suspect that some part of us senses the potential of a looming catastrophe in a single mistake. Well, I suppose there are fundamental optimists among us that see a silver lining in everything, no matter how potentially bloody an event might be.

I’m not one of them. I’m lazy and worry about the cumulative law of behavior and actions–a sort of view that supposes karma lurks around every corner. It’s a warm and fuzzy view when the particulars and the patterns are going well, it’s a high tension view when the particulars and the patterns seemed to be heading into that precipice. The lazy part warns me that a plethora of work is about to follow if a mistake occurs. The lazy part of me loves it when things are going well and I can just look around and take in the beauty without the high tension stakes inherent in the profound potential of an event. It’s sort of like the difference between a meandering Sunday drive on a deserted country road versus the high stakes risk of the NASCAR racing circuit.

Now this doesn’t mean that we all would like to bump along at the speed of a depressant-drugged tortoise, that gets kind of annoying all right. That’s not me either. But the misreading of signals or of other information in high speed mode is enough to slow most of us down (and avoid those that just don’t care).

This seems evolutionarily sound–how survivable would it be if we didn’t examine how well our decision-making and information-gathering abilities worked? Why keep running into that same wall? We don’t want to be a story in the Darwin Awards literature.

But the how-right-are-things-going litmus test can have its pitfalls. What to do if one is a Smurf in a world of Klingons? This is what made Robert Heinlein’s book, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” an easy book to relate to.

So, how do we know when we’re doing okay or if we are merely a misplaced entity, or maybe just an incompetent one?

Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes the mind that entertains us with all of our heroic endeavors, with all of our Nobel-prize-winning decisions, with all of our charm soon to be discovered, is nothing more than its own drug. And the same exists for the mind that sees all of our stupidity and worthlessness–our hopeless railings against what can be seen as a universe singularly unaware of our existence, much less caring about that existence. That’s a drug of another kind, but one that still wraps its cocoon firmly around us.

In the midst of these drugged-like states, ones seemingly foisted upon us by our culture as well as a more than willing biology, and certainly bought into by own selves, the only thing I’ve found that brings me back to an even keel, is to stop partaking of the drug. But that can be an existence that doesn’t seem like existence, it’s an environment that can seem so empty that it can remind us of what we think is death. Space is a place to be filled, right?

Sometimes I wonder why we are so uncomfortable with being empty, with being nothing?

Perhaps it is just because it is unfamiliar territory and how can one have a map of nothing? Without a reference point, how do we know anything?

It’s scary, especially when wonder has been usurped by dogma.

Maybe what we perceive as incompetent is made up–a litmus test, burning bush, cookie-crumb trail illusion. What if being incompetent was the inability to be no-thing at all?

Hmmm, that’s a weird reckoning in a world where we’re judged by the things we know, the things we have, the legacy we leave, the accomplishments we’ve acquired. In such a world, even enlightenment or salvation can become a brass ring and a distinguishing feature–and fodder for egos busily carving niches on a hierarchical ladder.