Complacency

I have never considered myself a complacent person, nor would anyone who met me. But I never realized just how rare my particular brand of drive is in this world. I meet people from all over, even in my own neighborhood, who are perfectly fine doing what their parents did for work, living in the same town, never making waves, never seeing their names in print, other than a local paper printing their obituary. And who reads the paper when they're dead?

Sometimes these people even move in to their parents' old house. Back in the day, this was common. The oldest male of the household would take over the homestead, once the father was unable to carry out his duties. Back then, it made sense to do things this way. Today there isn't much of a need to stay in one place for generations and generations. Yet time and again, especially the people I have conversed with who are from the southern States, I see this complacency. There is no desire to move somewhere new, explore the world around them, achieve things. I do not understand this mentality; it is foreign to me.

Those not from the south would call it a stereotypical southern laziness, but there are lazy people from every type of culture. I see people from the south as being complacent, with a passive disinterest in higher pursuits. They like things as they are and don't do much to change them. My opinions could very well change over time, if I meet more people from the south and get a larger pool from which to sample. For now, though, that is what I think of southerners.

I'm also coming to realize there isn't necessarily anything wrong with this way of life. We can't all be leaders--sometimes it takes just as strong a person to follow as to lead. Every country has commonfolk, a middle class, and in this mortal realm it just makes sense. The working class is the backbone of a country, performing necessary labors that benefit the entire population. One should never mock the purity of a good old-fashioned day of hard labor. Farming, for example, is much more honest work than politics and the machinations of men in their ivory towers.

I like to talk with complacent people to understand what makes them tick, not to criticize or judge. It is fascinating for me to talk with those who do not spend their lives achieving, striving for something greater. Perhaps a better term to use is "enduring;" I like discussions with those who do their duties and endure. We can all learn something from each other, and perhaps us overachievers can learn to slow down and appreciate where we are in life, at this very moment, from our more complacent friends. Maybe I do understand their view of life.

But I don't think I could ever live that way for long. There is much too much to see in this world, sights, sounds, tastes and smells to discover--if I can't travel the world, I want to at least talk to people from all over. That's one reason I love books so much--I can't possibly know what it was like to be a black girl in the 1940s, but I can read a firsthand account of one. Literature is one of the best ways to get into the mind of someone else, a person, a lifestyle, a way of thinking you could never even begin to imagine because it is so far outside your own realm of thinking.

People who live without passion are also people I don't quite understand. Then again, when I really get to know a person, I have yet to meet someone who didn't have at least some small spark of passion inside. It might not be the raging inferno I have, but it's still there.

The more I talk with and learn about people, the more I learn about myself, stereotypes, and the world. Stereotypes do have a basis in fact, but that doesn't mean they have to be bad. In the end, less driven people means less competition for me :)