Friday, November 12, 2010

The Insufficiency of the Pluripotent Plenipotent

As if being plenipotent is not enough, man nowadays strive to go beyond just greatness and power and aim for pluripotency. The idea of “Jack of many trades, master of none” is scoffed at more and more as man targets perfection like no other. The concept is if you can be great at one, why not more? 

I laud these people, really. Even I am guilty of wanting this in one form or another. But lately I have realized that this endeavor is nothing but a recipe for one thing – A TIRED OLD MAN! 

The effort to make one plenipotent takes time, and a lot of it. It is rare that men were born plenipotent. The idea of power being a birthright is an insult to the true nature of power. Power is made complete in the generation of conviction, molded and refined by the kiln which we call life-experience. The longer it stays in the kiln, the more impurities are spirited away . The result – a pure energy-giving power. 

On the other hand the requisites to be pluripotent takes not much time but a lot of effort. It takes a preponderance of skill (or a semblance thereoff) to get one started on the path that leads to pluripotency. And it takes just little time to be involved in many endavors, a true multilateral effort advancing a small step at a time widening the ever-growing circle that is ones sphere. 

The key to plenipotency is time and that of pluripotency is skill. As each one grows, time gets scarcer and skill gets thinner. In the end, time has ran out and skill has all but dried up. The result is an aged fatigued version of ones former self. 

Although the exploits of the world pushes us to excel in all fields at the same time, it also pushes us to fail not by the world’s standards but by the ones we have set in our young days, when all was fresh and free.  

This antithesis brings to mind the life of the Biblical Moses. Definitely plenipotent, imagine raining ten plagues to one of ancient’s greatest civilization, no questions there. Definitely pluripotent, being the second in command in Egypt to being the leader of a nomad people, no questions here as well.

But if we look closely at his failures, the greatest came because he thought himself pluripotent and plenipotent at the same time.  He was told to speak forth water from the rock but by sheer arrogance (or naivete, cause I don’t want to berate a great Biblical icon sacred to the three great monotheistic religions of the world) he struck the rock with his stick. The consequence of this nonetheless great miracle is that he never entered his promised land. It was also in his story, that through the most iconic of all miracles, that  people knew the power of stillness, of doing what is contrary and setting ones self up for failure – the parting of the Red Sea!  

It is only through being still that we appreciate how fast time really flies. It is through giving up, that we appreciate the value of one skill. Only in the leadings of failure that we see clearly success and the satisfaction that comes with it. 

I don’t urge people to fail. I only say that failures are sometimes part of the journey to the zenith we so aspire.  That is the parody of true success. 

Failure of the pluripotent plenipotent to fail fails him to be the pluripotent plenipotent that he truly is.

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