Complex Numbers

Inspiration and Aspiration

inspirational (adj.): providing or showing creative or spiritual inspiration

PROMPT July 5th

Tell us about someone you find inspirational.

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/inspirational

Well, I've already mentioned Leonard Cohen too many times this month. I think he, more than anyone else, made me want to attempt this whole "writing" thing.

Springsteen, maybe? Nah, doesn't quite fit the definition. I can like someone's art without having it nudge me into making my own.

Neil Gaiman? Hm. I've deliberately cribbed his writing style on occasion, but I'm not sure that counts, either.

Or I suppose I could pick the person who penned this prompt, because they inadvertently inspired me to write this entry, or Emily for posting it. But I don't think that really fits the spirit of the prompt.

The problem might lie in the definition, or in myself. See, I'm neither "creative" nor "spiritual." And I've grown to resent the entire concept of inspiration, thanks to pervasive positivity memes on the internet.

Unless you count these  . But no, those images don't actually make me want to create my own; they just make me laugh.

I know lots of people have inspired me to do this or that thing, but just as I almost never do anything for just one reason, I also almost never do anything just because of one person. Like, long ago, when I decided to become an engineer, I couldn't point to any one engineer and say, "that person is the reason I became an engineer." No, it was a combination of things, like seeing locks on a canal and the Hoover Dam and the Brooklyn Bridge and any number of public works projects.

Which is not to say that everything was my idea. Far from it. Like I said, I'm not very creative. No one can do something without all the work that came before. Specifically, I'm thinking of Nikola Tesla, for example, or Isaac Newton, who supposedly said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." And then he went on to revolutionize everything.

When I was a kid, I think in elementary school, I have vague memories of an awards ceremony at the end of some school year. Like, they'd pick categories and hand out certificates. These days, from what I understand, such things aren't done as much because they leave out too many people, and I guess everyone gets participation trophies. This was also before the concept of "graduating" from elementary school. So anyway, a couple of things from that ceremony stuck in my mind, though I can't swear my memory of that time is all that accurate.

The first one was an award for "perfect attendance." When I was a kid, I'd catch a cold, or worse, at least once a year, necessitating that I stay home and be bored rather than go to school and be bored, and I remember thinking how unfair that particular award was. "Congratulations. You either never got sick, or you came to school anyway and infected the rest of us." At least I'm pretty sure I had the basic concept of germ theory figured out by then. Either way, I thought that was bogus.

But even more bogus, I thought, was someone who got the award for "most improved."

I can see your eyebrows furrowing from all the way over here. "How is that a bad thing?" you're asking.

Well, at least in my little-kid mind, I was going, "Huh. So if I'd started out getting bad grades, then gotten good grades at the end of the year, I could have gotten that award instead of "Biggest Pain in the Teacher's Ass" or whatever. See, I was savvy enough even then to never actually do my best work, and thus stand out as The Nerd. (It would be years before I learned to embrace my inner nerd, but by that time it was too late; I was already a committed slacker.) So I couldn't have gotten the "Best grades" award, but I could definitely have faked improvement over the course of a school year.

The actual award I got was so embarrassing that I don't even remember what it was; I only remember being terminally embarrassed by it.

The point to this rather lengthy digression from the subject is that the person who won that "most improved" award inspired me to always start out shitty so that people could praise me for having improved so much.

I don't even remember his or her name.

And if you don't think that's an important habit to get into, consider the well-known story of Einstein having failed mathematics as a kid. You might say that would make him the "most improved" thinker of all time.

Except that it turns out that the story, like Washington and the cherry tree, is completely fabricated. But it keeps getting repeated anyway, which just goes to show how that it's less important to simply be great, and more important to achieve greatness after having started well below average, so that people will think it could happen to them, too.

That's inspiring, isn't it?