TOW: Good or Great

In the book The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, there comes a point where Duddy must choose.  He has his family, his girlfriend, and everyone on his side, they worked together, lived together, laughed together, and life was very good.  There was nothing else he could want.  He had everything a good life had.

Except for the very dream that had lead him to this point.

Kravitz worked, gambled, begged, borrowed and stolen to get him to the penultimate place in his life.  He wants land.  He sees a plot of land he wants, and he wants it more than anything else in the world.  Problem is, so does the other richest person in town.  And in one moment, Duddy throws away everything, tumbles from grace rather than falls, and puts all his bridges into flames for the deed to one scrap of land.  Because Kravitz didn't want to be anybody--he wanted to be somebody. 

This was the point in the book I was horrified.

In life, we are faced with a duality, and a Duddy Kravitz dilemma.  Do we choose the plot of land, or do we choose 'the good life?'

No easy answer.

It's not a matter of creature comforts versus our pride--it's much more sincere than that.  It's a question of our most intrinsic desire--to be happy--cut against the grain of our ability to imagine what is possible.  In other words, it is our dreams versus our happiness.  Our desire to change versus our desire to stay the same and love what we have.  It is the difference between good and great.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately, and perhaps it's because I come from a family of people who generally overachieve in some way or another that I often struggle with this problem, and probably I struggle because I want to lead a good life.  And it is simply my desire to be great, to imagine what I could be, that keeps me in so much pain as I strive to create my own income, fund my own dreams, and heck, pay my own rent.  And I think sometimes my problem is that I focus so hard on trying to get ahead I lose sight of the goal.  A plot of land does no one any good if you sacrifice your life and the life of your family for it. 

But still, the desire to be great is in each one of us, and it takes a massive amount of self-understanding to achieve anything valid or valuable in life.  For some of us, we struggle with being good, with self-discipline, with well-ordered desires.  For others, we have lost sight of the possible.  We fail to embrace the goodness and wonder in the universe, the very things that make us wake and sleep.  The whispers in our hearts that say 'keep breathing,'  there is hope farther yet.  Breathe in, breathe out.  Breathe in.


Every person's life will foreshadow the mistakes and triumphs of choosing between good and great.  That choice is a harsh reality that takes us down to either good decisions or bad, great decisions or mediocre ones, happy lives or one's without happiness.

In my life, the choice has never been a problem of being good.  It was always easy for me.  I can easily be contented if I feel I am living as a 'good' person. 

But the struggle for me is always to reach out beyond what I am used to, and be afraid to fail, and there are plenty of things that scare me, and failure most of all.  I hate failing. 

In my life, where everything seems to change, day in, day out, as I search for my plot of land, the point is to know greatness comes in many shapes and sizes, as does goodness.  And being a person of value means not being destroyed by your own desire to be wealthy, or a winnner by societal standards.  I have been thinking about what I feel makes me different.  And I have decided that there is very little that makes one person different from one another besides their actions, and their reasons for those actions.  But we don't all have to be a Duddy Kravitz. 

Instead, choose integrity.  Because when we die, or when other people have things to say about us, we can only ever be sure of our own moral integrity, whatever worth that has for us.