Humility? I give up.

I read Seth Godin's blog sometimes. These marketing, techie people are truly amazing, the cool websites, all the links, the pictures, I'm in awe. Anyway, at one point I was even driven to try to install trackback code into my blog's template. I failed.

If I believed in evolution then I would probably have to concede at this point that these people have evolved into a higher life form. That thousands of years from now someone will dissect the frozen matter that was once my brain and decide that there was a fork in the evolutionary road and we took differing paths. Just like there is a cro-magnon man and a Neanderthal man, I'd probably carry a different label than tech people, but right now I'm just too close to the situation to tell what that label might be.

Anyway, where was I?

No where near the point I was going to make.

Seth links to Ira William's manifesto on humility.
I stopped at this quote:

"Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor
does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from
thinking about yourself at all."--William Temple, Sr.

I made it about three minutes before I began to realize how hard it is to be humble and not think of yourself. It is so difficult to be humble. Try it yourself. Try to not think about yourself for the next five minutes. I think this is perhaps the hardest thing I could ever do, and I've given birth, sold books door-to-door, and walked over the bones of a dead desert mountain goat on an unmarked trail on the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Then I thought, wow! This is so hard! If I could be legitimately humble. I'd be the greatest person to ever live! I began to fantasize about all the book signing and the speeches before millions of people, the cool website that someone else, one of those more highly evolved beings, would design for me so that I could read cool comments about myself and about how I had changed their lives--How some man who had not gotten out of bed in six years saw my infomercial on T.V. and began to workout and lost 733 lbs. Or how Bill Gates read my book (well if I were that humble, then someone else would write it) and decided to buy and refurbish Nambia. Or how Paris Hilton saw my interview with Oprah and decided, well, decided to do something--legal and with clothes on. If I could be truly humble I could SAVE THE WORLD!

Anyway, where was I, oh yeah, being humble is really hard.

It's probably downright impossible to do on my own.

But maybe if we all really try together; maybe then we can all evolve into a humbler species. I'm not sure how that would look? Would we de-evolve? Whenever we here of a species that is humble it is usually something like a dung beetle or earthworm. No one says, "And looking across the Savannah we see the lion, humbly devouring its prey." In this world, if you become humble, you'll quite likely be crucified.