Our Best...

© 2011 Johnny Domawa

All Rights Reserved

v. 1.1

Ganbatte!

Do your best!

We always give this advice to people who ask us of it. “Do your best!” “Kaya mo yan!” “You can do it!” “Kayam dayta, sika pay” “Ganbatte!” “Lo mejor de ti!” “Faites de votre mieux ! ‘ and we mean it.

“If you do your best at something, something good will happen!”

But we all know it is not true, not all the time, not even for most of the time. It is one of the hard truths that this world teaches. I am an adult in my thirties and it is one of life’s harshest lessons. It is painful to realize this but even when you put in your best effort, there are things in this world that just wouldn’t work out that way you want them to be. 

Like, a man can spend most of his lifetime striving for something and have nothing to show for it at the end. A man will sweat and bleed for his family and it will crumble in time: the kids will rebel, the wife finds another man... Another would sacrifice everything for his career and find out that it was never worth it. And another can turn his back on the promise of something great to reach his dreams only to realize that it was never worth pursuing to begin with.

Life sucks.... most of time. Beyond the smiles presented in images we take liberally from our cameras and phones, behind the achievements we have which draw the envy of others, beyond the exasperated exultation of tweets and facebook posts we liberally create.... there is always the underlying line of anxiety that cloaks our existence.

Life was never a mathematical equation. Effort and persistence rarely equals success. Politics and human biases as well as minute details which remain uncontrollable often have a greater say on the state of our lives. We all get to know this ugly truth… and we all coat it in candy wrappers.

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So is this advice moot?

If it is, this world will stop moving. 

We all need the factory worker in the third world to do his best to give us those designer clothes. We need the hardworking farmer to till his land to give us our food. We need that patient clerk to make sure our records remain consistent. We need the janitor to keep making our workplace decent. We need our househelps and nannies to mind the kids. Hell, we even need the best of our celebrities to keep the gossip mill going or else we’ll run out of conversations.

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Most of people’s best go unnoticed. That laborer striving to finish his quota for the day, the driver guzzling cup after cup of coffee to cope with the long drive to deliver his goods, that crazy supervisor who is always on our case to make us work more, that nurse enduring a long shift to make sure IVs and medicine are delivered properly to patients, you and countless others… we all do our best for nothing more than the paycheck we get at the end of the week. We often don’t receive pats in the back or plaques on the wall. Meeting quotas only makes our boss happy; drinking coffee make us caffeine addicted; the supervisor gets even crazier the more we meet his ever increasing demands; and that nurse rarely gets to enjoy life or the result of her hard work. We go home, sleep, then rise up again to another similar day…

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This is life…

It’s f***d up (pardon the expletive)…

I won’t sugar coat it. Only for this time. 

Do your best!

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Let’s all do that…

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We should all do that…………..