To Be Content with Mediocrity

 To Be Content with Mediocrity

By Kevin Wasden

It has taken me a long time to become content with mediocrity.

That is a lie. I am not content; there is no satisfaction in insignificance. The truth is that I am old, tired, and have merely surrendered to this inescapable sphere of unimportance that I occupy. 

No, I am not content. 

                                           I am hopeless.

It’s not that I have never felt ambition’s tug. 

I have. 

I have cradled dreams in my arms, nourished and nurtured them, and watched as one-by-one they matured, wrinkled, and shriveled with the aches and pains of an inadequate existence, never developing into the marvelous creatures I had envisioned. 

I have never reached greatness. 

                                                    But I have tried. 

Over and over again, I have stood tiptoe and scratched with my nails at the hatchway in the ceiling of my station, hoping that providence might open the passage before me into some higher echelon.

I have hoped in vain.

And so, I remain undistinguished, ordinary, good, but not good enough, forever lost somewhere in the middle, neither first nor last, neither the best nor the worst.

I am inescapably,

                                      decisively

                                                           mediocre.