Is Greatness Larger Than Life Or The Fabric of Life?

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What is greatness?

I’m listening to Brandi Carlile, an American folk-rock singer, harmonize with her two bandmates, Phil and Tim Hanseroth. The sound is like a deep bedrock hum merged with an eagle splitting air — raw, ethereal, devastating. I’ve heard it live. I hear it on Spotify while I walk. I can hear it when I sing their songs in the dark, sitting on a metal chair outside on these balmy summer nights. Are their entwined voices greatness?

To me, yes.

I think of the pretty widow’s shawls my mom crochets with kindness for local strangers. She tells me about the yarns and the various stitches since I’m her only child to crochet. She shows me photos and I’ve seen them in person. They’re lovely. My mom moved her crochet needle in and out of a succession of yarn holes for a mourning stranger in the weeks after my dad died. I imagined her tears sliding down her cheeks as she gave her knowing heart to a fellow widow. Are the compassion and care that stitched these triangular shoulder wraps greatness?

Yes.

Michael Phelps was great, and so was Mahatma Gandhi. There are lists out there populated with household names of greatness — an indication of how great. Churchill, Einstein, Gutenberg, Beethoven, Hawking, Pasteur, Bell, Ford, Curie, the Wright brothers.

But there wouldn’t be this complex human world if greatness only pertained to the highest achievement, the greatest skill, or the biggest influence. That list is too microscopic to support such an expanse of progress. Our species relies on greatness from each of us Monday through Sunday. It’s a wild dust storm of brief acts of our best selves, ricocheting off each other to make what we call humanity.

Eighteen years ago, I remember the moment our taxicab got to a point on a long road in Giza, Egypt where the great pyramids popped into view. It was a mental shift to transfer from the icon I’d always accepted as a thing in the world, to the actual thing. The whole experience for me flowed around this one constant question — what was it like for those workers to build this? Averaging the theories for how many people worked on these pyramids, you understand it was thousands upon thousands of people working together on one project over perhaps decades.

Is this not a mind-boggling collection of greatness? Each rock cutter, rock transporter, carpenter, baker, water carrier. When I saw the great pyramids, I saw not one great architect, but an arena of great contributors who died in anonymity. I’m not sure how to accept that.

I’ve lived in two places where there was mega greatness all around — New York City and the DC metro region. Who knows where greatness begins and ends in these places? Except I know.

It begins each morning when an unknown number of the millions of sleeping people here wake up and put their feet on the floor. Of all the world-shattering achievers in these two metropolitan areas, this select list of folks who pull themselves out of bed each morning despite trauma, heartache, or abject fear crashing down on their heads — they are greatness. Even though Michael Phelps was incredible, he wasn’t greater than that.

Greatness comes in the ones who work more than one job, morning to night, living week to week, unsure, hoping, praying, and doing, despite their doubt.

Greatness is working overtime, coming home to an empty kitchen, cooking up dinner for two, then running half of it to the disabled elderly neighbor nearby before running home to eat the other half alone.

Greatness was the medical worker facing each day during Covid. Or the hourly employee who sends half their paycheck to parents in a faraway country. Or it is the backstage staff member who works round the clock on one tiny aspect of a multi-country negotiation to adopt a policy that might improve the world. It’s the exhausted mother who sleeps fitfully next to her gravely ill child.

If I say greatness is all these things, then have I ever been great? Suddenly, I’m not sure.

I’ve been reading lately about a mother who endured the death of her teenage daughter years ago and surfaced to write about it. My strength has not been greater than her strength.

I’ve read about a woman who lived her childhood under an abusive foster-turned-adoptive mother, then later in early adulthood lost her husband, but lived an adult life of integrity. My fortitude does not come close to that.

I know people who volunteer a sizable percentage of their time to help others. They devote their energy to those things instead of to something of their own. My generosity pales in comparison.

Maybe you and I are similar in that we can’t see our greatness, but I bet it’s there if we looked harder.

Have we ever withheld verbal retribution and offered understanding instead? Isn’t that greatness? If we did this a handful of times, does that compare to Einstein or Gandhi? Maybe not, or maybe we haven’t figured out what greatness is.

Maybe greatness happens each time we turn toward something greater than ourselves when we could have easily turned only to ourselves. Whether we live a life of this, whether our actions are remembered for generations or millennia, or whether we slowly create a willingness to do these things — maybe that’s all greatness.

I just came home today from a birthday party for my mom. My uncle was there and I off-handedly asked him whether he — a retired commercial airline pilot — knew anything about applying for a job with the major airlines that I could pass along to my son’s childhood friend.

My uncle picked up his phone and proceeded to make phone calls to help this fellow he never met. It was because he loves my son and me and because he does great things blindfolded. After he got two pilot mentors lined up, he walked back outside to help my mom do yard projects in the ninety-degree heat.

That is greatness, and to witness it is to increase my chances of being great. This is how it spreads — the dust storm of our best selves — by example, and through appreciation. One stone, one phone call, one crocheted shawl at a time.

Hope you're well, friends. :-)