We are all doing the best we can

(Several friends/readers have told me that they like it when I bring up “different“ ways of looking at things” within my weekly column. I propose to do exactly that in this morning’s edition.)

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Back when I was in college, a friend of mine said to me, “Ben, you know if all the millionaries in this country switched places with all the homeless, in about ten years each group would be right back where they were to begin with. It all comes down to grit and determination.”

Being young and naive, I actually kinda believed his words at first. I had also long been taught that grit and determination were virtually everything in determining my personal future, and that luck or chance had little or nothing to do with it.

But life…and time…have ultimately taught me differently.

I now know something that I didn’t know long ago. In fact, I actually didn’t know this particular something until very recently in my life. It took decades of working with both the rich and the poor, people who lived in mansions or were homeless, people who seemed to have everything going for them and people who seemed to have nothing.

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At this point, before continuing, please permit me to ask the reader a few questions.

During your childhood, were you close to living in constant poverty? Or closer to living in what might be called comfortable conditions?

How much formal education did you have?

Who were your parents? Your grandparents? Did you get to choose who they were?

Did you get to choose everything your mother did while carrying you around for 9 months?

Did you get to choose what terrible childhood traumas you experienced (or, by the luck of pure chance and/or the grace of God, did not experience)?

Answers to these questions combine to help determine how virtually everyone else in society “sees” us. Right now. As in … “whether we are trying the best we can in life, or not”.

For instance, if you are a human whose facial bone structure is exceptionally handsome or pretty (as the case may be), then you “won the lottery” in life in many ways - at your birth. (Think this may not be true? Then think about when you last saw a physically “ugly” movie star or famous pop singer, or CEO, or millionaire business owner - male or female.) As the great writer, Leo Tolstoy, once said, “It is amazing how complete is the illusion that beauty is goodness.”