Blessed is a loaded term because it blurs the distinction between two very different categories: gift and reward. It can be a term of pure gratitude. “Thank you, God. I could not have secured this for myself.” But it can also imply that it was deserved. “Thank you, me. For being the kind of person who gets it right.” It is a perfect word for an American society that says it believes the American dream is based on hard work, not luck.
If Oprah could eliminate a single word, it would be “luck.” “Nothing about my life is lucky,” she argued on her cable show. “Nothing. A lot of grace. A lot of blessings. A lot of divine order. But I don’t believe in luck. For me luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity.”and
And as a scholar, I can say that our society is steeped in a culture of facile reasoning. What goes around comes around. Karma is a bitch. And God is always, for some reason, going around closing doors and opening windows. God is super into that.
Pair all that with finding love being about luck (and not preparation for opportunities).
Personally, I'm in the middle of these polar views: luck matters, but you can also (sometimes) make your own, prepare for opportunities, and position yourself for opportunities. Sometimes that doesn't get you anywhere, but sometimes it does.
In any case, I wholeheartedly agree with these two pieces celebrating singledom and rejecting the myth of the other 'half,' because you're already whole.
Last week I posted an article about another myth: that of 'the lazy girl.' Pair (or reconcile) it with this piece on 'resting on pretty.'
And in a world that increasingly values the production of beauty and the labor of beauty over beauty in and of itself—a world where a 27-minute YouTube tutorial on natural brows and contouring can rack up more than a million views—that truly is a crime.
Madeleine Albright makes some good points, including the one about how representation matters.
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