It’s the time of year movie makers anticipate to see if their productions are going to garner any hardware. Whether it’s a Golden Globe, Screen Actors’ Guild, Oscar or one of the countless other fetes, awards season is time for the industry to celebrate its achievements and promote its people. The intent is to honor the best of the best.
Running counter to these galas are the critics and organizations that announce their choices denoting what they deemed the worst of the worst. Lots of talk about the best…and the worst…of what the movie industry had to offer this year. Being the best or the worst creates buzz. That’s a good thing for them. Conversely, to cause little reaction is a fate no studio wants to experience. Better to be considered one of the worst than to be forgotten because even a movie deemed lousy will still generate as much talk, analysis and buzz as those considered the best of the bunch. It is more desirable to be on one end of the spectrum or the other than to simply be unnoticed in the middle.
Emily Dickinson, a prolific poet, published only 10 poems during her lifetime. Now she is a staple in American Literature poetry classes thanks to the volumes of poems published after her death. One of the most well-known is “I’m Nobody” which begins “I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know”.
Being “somebody” puts an individual at one extreme while a “nobody” would place them on the opposite end of that spectrum. At one end we put the rich, the famous and the notable while at the other is the forgotten, the lost and the outcast.
The powerful, the affluent, and those who live in the public eye generate a lot of buzz and it seems to be that even more money and influence follow. They are somebody. In contrast are the very poor, the victimized and those who live in difficult conditions that are more often than not cyclical. They have no resources and no power. Too often they are seen as statistics or global problems needing to be solved.
Then there are those who find themselves sitting somewhere in the middle. That’s many of us. As we sit on that spectrum we can choose to look in either direction. Perhaps we are tempted to look longingly at the somebody end and want what they have. How great would it be to have more money, more acclaim, more influence and wield more power? Oh…to be somebody.
What about turning our heads to glance the other way? Do we take the time to see what is there? It’s much easier to look at the somebodies and imagine ourselves living like they do, while it is disconcerting to look the other way and think about how with a simple change of circumstance we could easily find ourselves there.
The problem with being a somebody in our culture is the way in which we have defined it. We place value on wealth, celebrity, position and power, and mistakenly equate that with worth. We stand at a distance and admire and elevate them.
When we glance the other way we see harshness of life. We feel overwhelmed, ineffective…helpless. We stand at a distance to mute the scene or we avert our eyes so we don’t have to examine it too closely. We have turned our fellow human beings into somebodies and nobodies based on our attitude toward them.
For us who find ourselves sitting too comfortably, it is time to end the comfort. We can’t duck and cover in the middle and hope we will go unnoticed. Tremendous power can be unleashed in the form of people who aren’t too far away to see the reality and who recognize we have enough to help.
We want to be somebody. We want our life to matter. We can keep straining to get a glimpse of what we think might fulfill us, or we can walk a far more satisfying path and turn our eyes in the other direction and find ways to bring resources, friendship and hope to those who aren’t looking for a way out but a way in.
So how do we become somebody? In the end it won’t make a difference if there are titles on our door or awards on our mantle. The way we make our life matter is to live in such a way that we make every life matter. That’s my outlook.
