This is a picture of my mom, sitting on their back porch, seen through the full glass door of my parents' living room.
My mom is an intensely ambitious person.
The word "ambitious" actually comes from the Latin verb "ambire" which means "going around." It was especially used in the context of "going around for votes, flattery, courting, desire for honor." That is, it was directed at an external source of satisfaction.
The word "ambition" in German is "ehrgeizig." A quite strange word which, literally, means "stingy with honor." Being stingy with honor, self-honor that is, also means that an ambitious person is frequently searching for honor from an external source.We can learn, then, that ambition is not only a desire or search for honor, it also is a stinginess with self-honor, and therefore implies a strong dependence on being honored, seen, appreciated by others.
That search is the yoke under which my mom lives and operates.
"Search" also is the root word for the German word "Sucht" (addiction). An addict is someone who is searching, forever and in vain. Addicts often are intensely ambitious people. But the restlessness of their search, its never-complete nature had become so painful that the pain needed to be quelled…with cigarettes, with alcohol, with drugs. A place, a substance, a person where this pain will go away. It's a place where the pain of the search, which is the separation between seeker and sought for thing, is sublated, gone. It's a place of union and boundarilessness.
I love seeing this picture of her, because here for a quiet moment (one cigarette length) she is not ambitious, only motivated. Smoking has always had this function for my mother: It broke up her ambitious day into periods of rest, periods of motivation. A few times she tried to quit smoking and the result always was the same: she became confused. The rhythm of hard, focused work interrupted by the steady beat of these smoking-reflecting breaks was gone and my mom had lost her footing.
From the perspective of the son these cigarette breaks were the moments when I had my mom, when she was present to me in a non-ambitious way. Buying her cigarettes, quickly running to the store and getting a pack (or, in the evenings when everything was closed, being sent to the machine to "draw" a pack) also meant that I was helping her find that rest. And that meant I was helping me.
This is why sitting with my mom while she smokes has hardly bothered me, because it has always meant sitting with a different, quieter person. And that is why, when I cycle by a certain bus-stop in our town, behind a certain hospital where many hospital workers stand and smoke, I am reminded of my mother; smelling the cigarettes…and I inhale deeply as I pass.
But what do I mean by "motivation?" I have in mind motivation as our inner stimulus, an internal voice, that can--undisturbed by outside judgment--act to guide us, lead us into areas of self-exploration and self-knowledge to which ambition never gets us. Motivation comes from the Latin verb "movere" the source of the English verb "to move." "Motus" is the past participle of that verb. A motivated person is a person who is motivated internally, not externally.
Is saying "I am ambitious" the same as saying "I am motivated?" Is one, perhaps, included in the other: to say I'm ambitious also means I'm motivated; or to say I'm motivated also means I'm ambitious?
I don't think so. The difference between ambition and motivation is the difference between being pulled and being moved.
When I see my mom as she is in this picture I know that, with the help of cigarettes, she is moved--deeply reflective, with herself, undistracted by external judgment. It moves me to see her like this. So deeply rested in herself.
I don't think my mother always was ambitious and driven the way she is now. I know that my mom is a deeply creative being. Her drawings and paintings, from the time when she was an adolescent, speak volumes about this. Her flower-arrangements, wreathes she makes... all speak of how she is/can be moved. My mom wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. That's what she felt moved to do. But her parents disallowed it.
I have to believe that, for her, ambition set in with the experience of having her motivation dismissed, suffocated even. As the internal goal of making art, of teaching, moved farther and farther away from her, she became ambitious. She wanted to be seen, complimented. And so the pleasure of making and doing simply in response to that internal impulse, because she felt moved to do it, had to make way for the risky and always fleeting pleasure of responding to an external cue.
It would be hard to measure how much I wish my mom could find that internal source of being moved again. Finding it would be like finding and staying with that unceasing source of unconditional love for self. Finding it would mean, too, that the burden of reassuring her would finally be lifted of us, her children and grandchildren. We could now, finally, love her without needing to praise her.
3 comments:
Very moving, Martin. I believe some ambitious people, at least as I use the word, are motivated in an interior way. It's just that they want something BIG....It is quite true, however, that big dreams in this world most often have great overlap with external praise and compensation. MLK was ambitious, in the wider sense of the word, because he had BIG dreams--not just of equality, but of peace, too. But he didn't seem to be in it for the money. Therefore it does seem odd to refer to him as ambitious, since the word is most often linked with external gain of the ego-feeding variety...I think it would be weird to state it this way: "MLK was an ambitious man". But this would be fine: "MLK had ambitious plans to liberate the entire South from racism." But, semantics aside, I found your account of a smoker and her motivations to be a poignant reminder of what we all want--to work from the inside out, to feel love without feeling at the same time that we have to beg for it.
Eleanor Rooseyvelt weighs in: Your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding. Not simply be what is generally called a "success."
It's funny how so often children want more attention from their parents; it seems in this case like the cigarette breaks gave you a break from your Mom's attention.
Post a Comment