Top to Bottom

“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.” — Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

Collectively, we tend to elevate some people in society to positions of power and influence. Some people crave power at all costs. And luckily for them, some people want to follow a compelling leader at all costs. This following takes many forms, from religious to political to celebrity. There’s a belief that some people are above us because they’re born into a certain family or went to a certain school or have a certain position that infers authority.

And yet we’re all human. We all hit the birth lottery and will eventually pass from this world. We all carry the weight of expectations for who we might be in this world because of the stories we and society tell us based on nothing but commonly held beliefs. But stories change all the time, as people do.

We ought to evaluate the stories we tell ourselves now and then as a level-set. We’re all just people, from the top of the heap to the bottom, and doing the best we can to figure things out as we move through life. We do have a say in how our story goes, and so ought to set our aim higher. Decide what to be and go be it.