You must be a disappointment

YOU may well know someone who had the potential to become accomplished in life but was never given the opportunity or had the opportunity snatched from them. There is the grandmother in the film Billy Elliot who could have been a professional ballerina or the Polish Jewish father in the film ‘Shine.

This is a biopic of the Australian pianist David Helfgott.

There is a scene which takes place many years after the pianist has been institutionalised for mental illness and subsequently released and unexpectedly meets up with his father. He tells his son how he, as a youth, wanted to play the violin but his father refused to buy one. He worked and saved to bring one home but his father smashed it.

The unspoken message is that the grandfather destroyed the violin but the father broke the son. The film unfairly demonises the father but to what extend do most people bear unfair criticism during their lives?

The film shows David and his wife visiting the grave of his mother and father to the uplifting music of Vivaldi’s Gloria. It’s a happy scene of sorts with David restored in mind and with hope for the future but it brings home how each generation silently and anonymously slip away into eternal obscurity – along with all their tiny insignificant struggles – swallowed up in a timeless vacuum of suffocating anonymity.

These cinematic moments bring home a deep anguish of the soul. We probably all feel it regardless of whether we could have become moderately or highly accomplished.

Over the years I have gazed down from my office window to watch people walk by. Some are young going to and from the local college, others old and gaunt and bowed by a life of physical work, mental pressure and resulting poor posture.

There are two or three generations of passers-by. The young have hope and aspiration while the old may well reflect on crushed ambition long since relinquished because the railway track led to the buffers too soon or the road went nowhere and petered out into a dirt track that, through neglect, became overgrown and ceased to exist. I wonder who these passers-by are, what brought them here now and what is their life story?

Who disappointed you; who have you disappointed.

How do you deal with disappointment; do you prefer to believe there is something rather than nothing in the bigger picture of life? The good we try to do is worth something even it is simply motivated by the desire to make our life slightly more bearable. The mistakes we make do not rub out the efforts and motives to achieve something useful.

If I ever get around to putting a lock on the shed door I shall count that as another little achievement, another triumph in the great swirling and unpredictable sea of existence.

Suffering disappointment and living with it is a wonderful thing. It is the only thing that enables us to empathise with others around us who suffer the same void. It’s the one thing that helps us rise above it because disappointment is not failure.

Disappointment defines our success. And the fact that you are reading this signifies you are successfully here today. If you were a famous person or a wealthy celebrity it would make little difference to the central triumph to you being here now.

Go out and share your triumph with others and enjoy their triumph too.