Respecting the Range

The soul’s greatness lies not so much in reaching lofty heights and making progress as in knowing and respecting its range. ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays

Our entire society is built upon lofty heights and making progress.

If we aren’t in pursuit of those aims, we are spinning our wheels, stagnating, not succeeding in life like we’re supposed to. We get into these modes of scaling heights and making progress so we’re doing something, even if it’s feels wrong or don’t make sense to us. We push blindly — willfully — onward, in the hopes that it’ll all work itself out eventually, and we’ll reach the finish line and receive the reward or recognition for our efforts that we deserve, which usually falls short of our expectations.

The reward we often receive is a depleted soul and a defeated sense of self because we know that something was wrong about the whole business from the get-go. So now, in spite of the time and effort put in, we have a pervasive sense of unease and unrest because we didn’t listen to ourselves. We didn’t respect the range of our soul, or care to dwell and delight within its depths that were created, special order, for us. We judge this to be somehow not good enough, and go looking elsewhere, while our soul’s range gets sorely stretched out of shape, ragged, raw, and fraying at the edges, which contributes to our sense of disconnect and malaise.

Our souls have greatness within them. Every single one. It’s the nature of the soul to aspire to greatness, to be great, and every one of us has a purpose within this greatness for our time on earth. What’s crazy cool about this is all of us have our unique role, designed with us in mind, which brings to mind Shakespeare’s famous quote of:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man, in his time, plays many parts.

We’re not talking about an understudy or secondary part on this world stage, folks. We each have a critical and unique role to learn, embody, and act out — the standout performance of our lives, if we choose it. Yet, instead of seeing this as a gift, we get distracted by someone else’s role or another person’s range of talents that we covet as…