Mediocrity is the Enemy of Progress

When I announced that the career in fine arts I chose to pursue would not involve creating decorative paintings to match someone’s couch, my mother asked me, “Why do you always have to do everything the hard way?”

I have come to understand that the hard way is the best way to learn why the tried and true is the best way to achieve mediocrity. Mediocrity just doesn’t cut it for me and my kind. The rest can drift down-stream and take what is given from the pulpit or a guru but I want the off-the-boat experience and will always prefer to slug my way through the jungle. Fear of the unknown is the enemy of discovery and progress: spiritual and material progress can not be made without exploration of the territory. The spiritual path that excites me is one of adventure and any sense of adventure finds complacency to be as abhorrent as regression. If Moses would have stayed in Egypt; Buddha, in the ashrams or Christ, in the mentality of the synagogue, we would not have ever gotten out of the tyranny of the norm for spiritual evolution of those times.

Our Friend,Big Al, used to say that he never suited-up for a football game hoping to keep his uniform clean. He knew he played a good game when he went to the showers with it a torn, bloody, mud and grass stained one. Those that sit on the bench hardly ever need to launder theirs. 

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Geo, 4,598