bjturk.commentary: role model

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this bjturk.commentary:
role model

A while ago, I received a surprise email from a friend of mine. Well, not just any friend, but a friend of mine for over twenty years from whom I don't hear as often as I'd like. He told me that he'd read one of my other items (unfinished business) and through that, re-lived my telling of the whole story to him, with a few details that either I hadn't mentioned to him before or that he'd forgotten. Then he told me something that really caught me off-guard. He said that I was kind of a role model for him.

I have been called many things, but never a role model. Of the few things at which I have managed to be successful, sheer survival is the biggest. That is how he said I have been a role model to him: for managing to not only survive, but to turn my whole life around when everything was hurtling downhill faster than a World Cup skier. It got me to thinking...

We are influenced, rightly or wrongly, by just about everyone who touches our lives, no matter how trivial. Think about the things that you do or say that you actually picked up in high school, from a classmate whose personality influenced you even though you didn't know him well. I caught myself just last night repeating what a classmate of mine used to say 23 years ago. Was he a role model for me? Sure, in a way.

And we don't always have a choice in who our role models will be. We often are simply influenced by a phrase, an action, or a gesture that we just take on even if we don't know why. In so doing, we grant that person a measure of immortality, even if they never know it. Our imitations of them cause them to live on, and possibly influence others through us.

And let's not forget that, just as we are influenced by others, we ourselves influence them in turn. In one way or another, for good and bad, we are all role models for one another. We'd like to think that we take on only the better characteristics of the people whom we've known, but it takes but a rudimentary self-examination to see that not all of the role models whom we have emulated have been positive. Just as we catch ourselves doing the odd good thing that we remember seeing someone else do, we too often hear ourselves speaking the very same words once spoken by our parents, and they are too often not encouraging.

I'm a role model. You're a role model. We are all role models. That being the case, shouldn't we do a better job of being someone to emulate? Are you doing all you can to be the kind of person others should be? If you don't really care, remember that your children will.

And on a personal note: thanks, Scott. It really meant a lot to me.

March 2, 2004

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