The Fastest Antelope

This morning driving up I-4 to a gig, I passed four state police cars. Two were sitting on the left side of the road with unfortunate targets of their radar guns pulled over and two more were in the median poised to pounce on more victims. I immediately thought of four lions on the Serengeti watching an antelope heard race by. The difference today was that the fastest antelope got pulled down and out of the heard instead of the slowest ones. The safest place to be is in the middle of the pack, cruising along at the same speed as the majority, safety in numbers, not drawing attention or sticking out in any way. I've read that the big cats have a hard time visually picking out one animal from a closely packed heard going by. I've also read that in a closely grouped bunch of cars the radar guns can't really pick out which car is going the fastest and I've even read of people using this as a defense in court to get out of tickets. We, the lucky ones, galloped by the carnage of blood and death and expensive tickets and lost weekends in traffic school and jacked up insurance rates relieved it wasn't us and feeling guilty for being glad about this. And most of us got from point A to point B in one piece this morning.

And that got me thinking further down this line to the way I'm living in general these days. After a lifetime of sticking my neck out, trying to be different, to do something a new way all the time, to attain to noble, extraordinary accomplishments, I'm forced to do things a lot more normally. A lot more the way lots of other people do it.

The extremes of our culture seem to get the attention. If you are on the bottom, you get all kinds of consideration from free cheese to free prescription medicine to perhaps free room and board in one of our fine jails or prisons. On the top of our society there is always someone wanting to sink their teeth in either out of wanting what that person has or a piece of it or of their attention. Or because of jealousy or just wanting to stick it to the man.

Down in the middle among the masses, one doesn't attract much attention, except by chance. The random robbery victim or whatever. But you are generally not singled out. You generally don't get a phone call just because your name is in the phone book unless you are the guy I went to high school with whose last name was Aabot or perhaps if your name is Navin R. Johnson. And if you do your life the way everybody else does, you probably won't become rich and/or famous or take over the world, but there's a good chance you will be able to make a living following in the footsteps of someone else who has made a living the same way.

I used to loathe this idea, but after trading my bird in the hand for the two in the bush and going away empty handed time and time again, I'm ready to just hang onto my one bird, thank you very much. This goes against every self help book and motivational speaker and athletic coach to ever put a sentence together. Average. Mediocre. Commonplace. These are all dirty words in our culture. But it can be a safe place to be and sometimes safe is not a bad place to be.