🏃‍♂️ Pursuing Ambitions and Dreams: Selfishness or Vocation?

"The devil take you. I refuse to hear anything about your whole moral outlook. Power is the moral principle of those who excel others, and it is also mine."
- Beethoven

"[My friends] are merely instruments on which to play when I feel inclined. I value them merely for what they do for me."
- Beethoven

Music was the whole purpose and meaning of Beethoven's life, and in it he saw his prescribed, predestined vocation. He did not choose music, for it had already chosen him - since his very birth. Greatness then was a duty and not simply a privilege. What did other people matter to him if they did not align with his goal of glory and immortalisation? The hinderers to Beethoven would surely have been evil, malevolent, and above all, irrelevant.

And did not his life, his philosophy of living yield music that has seized the entire world! And if he chose to be humble and to live a simple life, surely none of his music would ever have come to exist or be known! It is by virtue then of his insatiable drive to create something great, and to see himself as something greater than other men that he forsook the lowly, famial life for one that brought him glory, fame, wealth, and renown - and all of this because he believed himself greater than other men! How can we resolve such a fascinating turn of the mind?

It is undeniable that all of us perceive ourselves as incredibly special, and that this thought is our greatest consolation in life. For what if we really were something so negligible, and something so forgettable that our place in this world can be as easily replaced as another blade of grass grows over where the other got plucked off? This is the ultimate despair, for this confesses a rejection of the compassionate, omniscient, masterful Creator! The more idle we are, and the less ambitious we are, the more this dark thought rests in our minds, and haunts and eats away at it!

All of us believe that there is something so incredibly unique within each of us, and that we were all born with this great, unfathomable potential, but a potential that we nevertheless continuously, and ruthlessly squander and smother, and yet love it deeply and pridefully possess it. Is this not a more arrogant life than the one which Beethoven had lived? What is more shameful: a life of unfulfilled potential, or a life of fulfilled potential?

Killing the Dream For Mediocrity

We damn ourselves to a common, lazy life only because we are prideful and afraid to unlock the grand, inconcievable potential which God has reserved and assigned to each one of us. But we would truly be mistaken to assume that our happiness and satisfaction in life depends on our pursuing it or not. For whether we end up unlocking our potential, we will die just as Beethoven did, and stand before God just as Beethoven will, right beside him and there would be no distinguishing between any of us!

To pursue a dream then is surely a matter of indifference to God so long as our lives are consecrated to Him, and not to the World. However, to not pursue it out of fear, and to then live in mediocrity - in misery and eternalised tentativeness - this is inexusable.

The greatest mediocre lives were chosen and accepted - not on the basis of comfort and pleasure - but on the basis of sacrificing one's own greatness for the greatness of others.

Is the Pursuit of Dreams and Ambitions Sheer Selfishness?

This is tricky, because if pursuing one's Dream causes them to disdain ordinary life and instigate a complex of superiority - what then? For almost all high achievers, this sense of superiority has been crucial to their success. The superiority has granted them motivation till the utmost - becuase in their eyes, if it were not for them, the world would suffer and not benefit.

If we did not adopt this mindset, are we not surely doomed to mediocrity? If we do not perceive ourselves as better than others, then how will we ever desire to excel those around us?

I am not suggesting that we treat others with scorn, pity, and a laughing eye! This mindset shift is reserved for the internalities foremost, but it is still necessary to treat others with a humble demeanour, and the greatest possible kindess and love.