A Search For Biggest Sins
When I was a child in Philadelphia, the adults around me spoke of people who were, “just taking up space.” And, although I wasn’t aware of it until much later, there was a pervasive attitude among those adults that everyone was expected to do the best that they could at all times. That did not mean that everyone was expected to succeed at all times, just that maximum effort was required: anything less was “just taking up space.”
Those adults also spoke of people who would “get there” and people who would “never get there.” I wondered where “there” was.
As I grew older, I imagined that the attitude flowed from my family and from the Irish-Italian-Polish-Catholic neighborhoods in which I lived. I never understood it as characteristic of the entire city until the death in 1997 of Philadelphia’s most enduring sports hero; baseball player, broadcaster, and columnist Richie Ashburn (who was actually from Nebraska). Tributes to Ashburn emphasized that in all of his endeavors he did the best that he could. One columnist wrote that this trait is the single most endearing one to Philadelphians.
A few weeks ago, a descendent center fielder of Ashburn’s, Aaron Rowand, ran into a wall (video) while chasing a fly ball, and broke his nose. In a column about Rowand, Philadelphia sportswriter Rich Hofmann wrote, “Now and forever, the waste of ability is the biggest Philadelphia sin. In fact, effort trumps ability every time around here.” After my childhood experience and the cascade of respect for Ashburn, Hofmann’s words rang perfectly true to me.
I now understand where the “there” is that some people would get to and others would not. “There” is wherever a person’s capabilities could take them.
I have lived in Cincinnati, now live in Phoenix, and have spent more than a month’s time in many other cities. But my experience in those cities is not deep enough to understand the nature of whatever “biggest sin” is abhorred within them. I suspect that the biggest sin in Cincinnati has something to do with dismissing children, and wonder if Phoenix is mature enough as a city to even have a biggest sin. I imagine that the biggest sin in New York has something to do with failure, and in San Francisco it may have to do with intolerance, but I don’t know.
So I ask, What is the biggest sin in your city or community, or wherever you grew up?
— Dick Richards (who is still trying to get there)
Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 9:10 am ◊ Comment or trackback
◊ Send this post to someone who will thank you for it »
◊ Filed in: Life's Lessons
June 17th, 2006 at 11:40 am
‘Don’t be stupid!’
I’m not sure WHERE I absorbed that one from, but it’s a very active thing for me. I fight against it all the time. Not in myself, but rather in my judgement of others.
I find that in my past, I’ve been very easy-going with people until they’ve made the same mistake a third time. And then I’ve kinda ‘cut them off’. They have ceased to matter to me. Blammo! ‘They’re stupid!’
So… I’m trying to work with this in my life. Probably means I’M scared of myself being stupid.
Blue skies
love
Roy
June 18th, 2006 at 8:44 am
Roy — aren’t these injunctions soul-destroying when we absorb them and carry them with us. And your “work with this” is quite a reminder that we all carry one or the other of them, and that it is indeed “work” to manage or get rid of them.
“Judgement” — yes, there is the really big bugaboo!
Your comment makes me want to have a “stupid day” to celebrate occasional stupidity. In the film (one of my favorites) “Harold and Maude”, Maude tells Harold something like, “We all have a perfect right to make asses of ourselves.”
June 21st, 2006 at 1:05 am
When I was younger, I was very keen on the tarot, and I used to do readings for myself fairly regularly.
I would draw a card upfront, called ‘The Significator’. This is a card you pull before you start the reading, to contextualise how you’re feeling, where you are in the world.
It stopped surprising me after a while that around 8 times out of 10, I pulled, at random, from a fully shuffled deck, card 0 — ‘The Fool’.
This card in tarot symbology, represents optimism, youth, joy, the beginning of new things, questing, searching, an open mind. It also represents journeying, swift movement. A whole load of things that are really cool.
Not to mention the fact that ‘The Fool’ in courtly terms was the jester, the only person in a royal court who had ‘license’ to criticise the king or queen and to accurately describe reality without risk of beheading or torture.
So yeah… being ’stupid’ isn’t the same as BEING stupid. It could be simply about changing perspective.
Blue skies
love
Roy
June 26th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
Or about approaching with a beginner’s mind.