Second Best

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who gave me advice, sent kind words or even just took the time to read my previous post. I cannot begin to describe how much you all helped me rescue myself from the abyss in which I had spent far too much time dwelling.

I actually had other thoughts I'd like to put into words, so, without further ado, here are today's ramblings.

I'm a writer. I love words. I enjoy making riverine sentences that flow from source ideas through meandering phrases before making their final point at sea. I'm also a mathematician. I'll see a "735" on a number plate and spend a second or two finding its prime factor representation. I'm a botanist and I have to know every tree's every detail. I'm a physicist forever knowing my actions to be limited by Newton's laws. I'm a chemist, picturing the structures of each listed ingredient on a toothpaste tube. I'm a pianist tinkering on the ivories. I'm a politician representing his people. I'm a chef perfecting his recipe.

Granted, I'm not many of the above in any great way. I'm yet to contribute to the world of mathematics, so cannot count myself among the mathematicians. I've not published a novel and so I'm not a writer. I don't work in a restaurant. I cannot remember winning an election of any sort, except as a class representative in sixth form. Nobody ran against me, according to my memory. The point which I have made incredibly poorly is this:

I cannot be all of me at once.

To devote oneself entirely to a cause is to sacrifice any loyalty to any other cause. This is a concept which I could not accept for a very long time. Now, I know that I can't be the best at everything; realistically, if being the best in one field matters to me, I would sacrifice for it any time which I would have otherwise spent on becoming great in another field. As it happens, there is nothing in the world which I care about enough to disregard everything else. For the first time in my life, I can say that I don't mind being second best.