I recently finished the book “Conversations with the Mann” by John Ridley and it brought up a lot of questions for me about how much we are willing to do to get where we want and what is perhaps more important; how we decide what we want. The story is about the life of a “negro, I mean black, I mean colored”(you will get the joke if you read it) African American comic; how he got where he got and the choices he made even when at the time he didn’t see them as choices. The story weaves it’s way through the perils of fame, the struggles of civil rights and integration, the quest we go on to find our own voice, the whole idea that when you get where you think you want to get you will finally be happy and the relationships you make and break on your way there. Over and over Jackie Mann is asked what he wants and his answer is simple, “Sullivan;” he wants to be on the Ed Sullivan show so he can really be famous. As a kid he used to watch the show and it defined every choice he would make. I don’t want to give away the story because it is worth reading, but my point is that what drove him, his singular purpose defined him and there is much to be learned from that kind of pursuit.
What we are willing to do
It is a rare gift to know what you want to be when you are young and for that one thing to bring you joy for a lifetime to come, but it does happen. It can get so easy to be stuck on a path because it’s the one we started out on that we sometimes never even look another direction and our greatest fear is that we might have to turn around and start over. We say we are going to do something and pretty soon we can’t do anything else. Even when it is the right path we can get so comfortable on it that we actually aren’t moving at all. Who we are and that thing which brings us our truest joy can be lost in the life we think we always wanted, but which we can’t even remember the reasons for wanting in the first place. None of this is to say that we can’t find that right path and stay on it into happiness, but the story of Jackie Mann reminds us that we need to be open to other roads that may turn out to be the true journey we are called to travel. If we are not open to any possibility but the one we start out with, we risk cutting off the people and the opportunities that surround us and in the end we may loose the chance to discover ourselves because of what we think we must be.
I suppose in the end the questions we must ask are: How much are you willing to give up to get what you think you want? How do we decide what we need to be? Who are you willing to hurt for your own ambitions? What about you is truly who you are? And the hope of it all is that somewhere along the way we find our voice.
Tripping the Light Fantastic 