Resting on your laurels
Does “ex-appeal” still sell?
Specially when your personal history was glorious, talking about it too often can turn you into a nuisance. For that matter, keeping old wounds of humiliation from closing is just as tiresome. It’s best to leave the past in a dark attic of the mind, to be visited only when requiring something like a name, a photograph, or a lesson learned.
A high-profile status once lost should be left behind. Resting on your laurels refers to being content with past achievements and leveraging these to open doors and define yourself — I was CEO of a conglomerate that has since gone bankrupt.
The etymology of laurels harks back to the ancient practice in Rome when winners of chariot races or wars were given laurel wreaths to crown their heads as symbols of victory and honor. So, resting on old symbols of excellence denotes putting too much store on shrubberies now faded and long past their blooming days, deserving to be perched not on heads but under padded posteriors.
Past achievements for sure enhance one’s bio-data. But they shouldn’t always be mentioned even in passing.
While luncheon speakers are sometimes introduced by their “former” exalted positions, such biographical history sometimes serves only to emphasize a now diminished status, even a fall from grace. Does “ex-appeal” still sell? Perhaps, it does only to the extent of providing perspective from another time and place.
A fixation on a former status often defines those no longer having anything to look forward to. Few things can be more embarrassing than a formerly powerful person, even one once at the top of the food chain, and now cast in the shadows, regaling anyone who cares to listen about the perks he enjoyed and the people he used to boss around. Thus are old people dismissed when repeating stories from long ago — he used to be just my clerk in charge of tracking sick leaves and organizing company picnics.
Still, the past cannot be wasted. It holds some lessons that can still guide future action. After all isn’t the rationale of recycling and efforts to save mother earth premised on discarded objects resurrected back to usefulness. Attics are raided for discarded clothes that sometimes come back in the fashion cycle. Slim-fitting shirts that are tucked out were already in vogue in the ’50s along with white suits and panama hats. Paisley ties too can still be dredged up and worn to theme parties featuring a retro band singing ’60s songs.
Selling nostalgia is good business. It works on the premise that the good old days were better than the present. The memory works with colored lenses and leaves out the unpleasantness of times past when there were no mobile phones and ATMs. Thus is the edited version of a simpler and less problematic existence promoted. It is a marketable illusion. The influx of concerts featuring aging bands (not the original members even) and names vaguely remembered from the past can fill up small concert venues with generous seating areas for wheelchairs and nurses’ stations.
Living in the past leads to an unwillingness to tackle the troublesome issues of the present. It can be a denial strategy which bestows an inordinate importance to triumphs that only the triumphant ones remember or value. Who cares if you once were an important person that many lined up to meet? Your former supplicants have themselves risen in stature and consider you a relic of their humble past. They may occasionally and kindly introduce you as their mentor.
Intentional amnesia, when it comes to old glories, is a truly refreshing trait of distinguished personalities. Modesty arising from a realization of the irrelevance of previous perches on now forgotten pedestals always elicit warm reception. If someone familiar with that period mentions, even just in passing, your previously awe-inspiring status, it is best to shrug it off and say — well, that’s all in the past. Where can I find the washroom?
And when conversation resumes, it is best to veer off to something totally off tangent. Do you usually take a small Americano with brown sugar? Such a conversational detour will convince the other person that perhaps you’re already losing your marbles... which may not be too long in coming anyway.