Stoner’s life, like every human life around us, has its aspirations, resentments, struggles, its successes that accumulate over a lifetime’s journey. In his life, from an outside perspective, one sees a lot of passivity, like, why wasn’t he more firm with Edith, or why didn’t he leave her and resist her attempts at manipulating Grace? Why didn’t he just compromise with Lomax over Walker? Why didn’t he fight for the chairmanship since he was the senior-most faculty? Why didn’t he fight the bad schedules given to him until the end of his life?
And similarly, a lot of ‘whys’ like why didn’t he do this or that? But when you look at your own life from an external lens, fro an aerial view, there are a lot of decisions and similar paths not taken that another person might ask: Why didn’t he do that?
Sometimes there is a quiet understanding within ourselves where only we know the answer why. But sometimes there is not even a realization of the path not taken because we are so engrossed in our own lives, looking and experiencing it so closely as to not see the bigger picture; no realization that there was another way to do things.
People have their fears, the chains that bound them, sometimes hidden from the world and sometimes hidden from the person themselves, so that they don’t know what they are bound by. So, it’s not even a struggle because there is not even an acknowledgment of being bound or of the existence of any struggle or of the choice that they have.
Looking at everyone around us, all of us have made, make, and continue to make decisions with this invisible constraint around us. It’s very easy for us to think that someone can solve this problem of theirs by just making a call to some estranged person, but they have that invisible force holding them back that we don’t know of. When I had severe social anxiety, I couldn’t speak to anyone, I just could not, while the solution from an outside view it would be straightforward. If I want to make friends and be social, I should just reach out, talk to people, and socialize, and voila, done, as simple as that, but it’s just not me, to be social, that’s just not my personality, there’s this invisible wall, an impediment, like there was for Stoner, holding him back from doing all the things that look so basic from the outside because he has all the complexities of a human, like me, and it was not so simple for him either. I mean, aren’t we impotent, in much the same way, as Stoner?
And isn’t going on William Stoner’s life and seeing his impotence and the results thereof meant for us to reflect on our impotence and on all the decisions we don’t make, where life carries us, instead of us stewarding it? And isn’t it a call to be rebel too?
So, in what way have you been or are you being impotent?
by ramjikatidda