You can choose to model yourself on superstars, celebrities, and Nobel Prize winners, but there is something to be said for drawing your inspiration from the quiet heroes and survivors you meet every day
As a journalist, when I’m briefed to do a Q&A profile with someone, one of the questions I’m often asked to pose is: “Who is your role model?”
It’s a common enough question, but it often leaves the interviewee stuttering and stammering as they mentally run through possible options that don’t include the usual suspects – Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Trevor Huddlestone.
For my own part, I find those kinds of role models too lofty. While I understand that they were once ordinary people who went on to do extraordinary things, I prefer to look at the ordinary people closer to home – the heroes I bump into as I navigate through a world that is filled with as much joy as tears, as much heartache as happiness.
So instead of latching onto someone who’s nothing more than a famous stranger to me, I build myself a kind of composite role model from the people I know who inspire me.
So my role models are those single parents battling through bereavement and divorce, and managing to raise their children into functional human beings in spite of everything their families have gone through.
I am drawn to people who are willing to be vulnerable – to admit that they are struggling, and that life isn’t always a bed of roses. And who persist, nevertheless.
I learn from people who battle with often crippling mental illness: depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and a raft of others – yet they get up every day, and drag themselves through work, social events, and other terrifying (for them) prospects while they wait for therapy and medication to right the chemical imbalances in their brains.
I am filled with admiration for people who grew up experiencing sexual, physical and emotional abuse, but who choose not to become abusers themselves, and instead take a path of kindness.
I admire the creative people I know who don’t care a jot for how their work will be received, who don’t beat themselves up for not painting or writing or dancing or playing an instrument perfectly. Instead they practise – they show up at the page, at the barre, at the piano – and make perfectly imperfect art anyway. Because they realise it’s about the process.
I am thoroughly in awe of people with disabilities who not only push to be seen in a world that favours the able-bodied, but who go on to do things I could never do with a body that works just fine. They paint, they draw, they compete in athletic events, while I, with my perfectly functional body, simply stand and stare in amazement.
I yearn to age like those senior citizens who are still curious, creative and cheerful, who don’t accept the limitations younger people might put on them and live their lives exactly as they choose, going through their final years with a smile, a ribald joke and a jaunty swing of their walking sticks. They make me want to age disgracefully and I have pledged to do so.
And most of all I am inspired by small children, who are so perfectly themselves in every situation – until we knock it out of them, that is. They smile, they dance, they pause to look at a tiny flower in the grass. Most of all, they play.
And that’s something I think we can all aspire to do more of.
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