Giants Among Us

Am I blogging on Christmas? Why yes, yes I am. Because today is Christmas, I thought I would take this time to talk about Jesus. Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish, but to me, Jesus seems like a mythical figure on the order of Zeus or Apollo. He lived so long ago that sometimes I take for granted he actually existed. He was born, he bled, he defecated. Jesus was a human being. Yes, an amazing human being, but he still existed, was still blood and bones the same as you and I. And that is pretty astounding to me. What I also found out today courtesy of one of my facebook friends, is Sir Isaac Newton was also born today. Newton wasn’t Jesus, but he was still a pretty remarkable guy.

This all probably seems very random, but it’s related because I am inspired by these people. People who were alive, people who cried, people who got angry. When I hear about folks like Jesus or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein or Martin Luther King Jr. I somehow put them above me. I think to myself, “Those were amazing human beings but I could never do anything like they did. I could never accomplish what they did. I’m just a girl from Kansas (which coincidentally is the title of my book).” I somehow don’t believe they felt the things I felt or struggled the way I struggled. Even when I read about the person’s challenges, in my mind it might as well be fiction because I’m so far removed. So today I’m reminded they are just like me. And in reality, why couldn’t you or I do world-changing things? What separates you and I from Newton, Einstein, MLK, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, or any of the other greats we read about? Nothing. They were people just like us. They had fears and failures just like us.

Today I feel on a very core level there is no separation from me and someone like Jesus or Newton or MLK. We all come from the same source. We’re all made of the same material. We all feel things. Any of the great people we read about could have just as easily said, “You know, I’m pretty tired, I think I’ll sit this out and let someone else do it.” The beautiful thing about all these people is they didn’t. They decided to push through their fears, to keep going, to not let the challenges stand in their way. They show us we too have the capacity for greatness. We too can do amazing, inspiring, uplifting things. We too have the potential to go down in the history books.

I dream of a world where we all know no person – alive or dead – is superior or inferior to us. A world where we understand nothing sets us apart from great people other than choice. A world where we pay attention to what we really love and then go do it. A world where we honor the giants among us while also knowing we are one of the giants too.

Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.