Ambition, like contentment, is one of those strange words to talk about with the children because it means everything and nothing at the same time.
In a sense we are all ambitious because we are all looking. Through our actions more than our words, this is the lasting message that we leave our kids: we are looking for others to love, we are looking for work that means something, we are looking for money or for power or maybe for healing or for just about everything and anything under the sun. We are looking because even when we’re not sure there is anything to be found, the search itself is so much part of life.
And then we find it but we don’t. Not really. Like last year’s worn Christmas gift, it’s not enough anymore and surely there must be something else and what can we look for now to fill the aching feeling we still have?
There is a man, an ambitious man by his own testimony, a young man who wrote ambition not only across his heart but literally across his wrist, tattooed in bold letters where one normally looks to tell the time of day. This is what he wanted the world to see, that more than anything this is what he is and this is who he wants to be: a man of ambition, a young man looking for more.
This tattooed man is now sitting in a jail cell with the weight of his ambition collapsed on him. The outside world continues to hear more about the places that his ambition took him, and the people, some no longer to be found, that his ambition put him in touch with.
And so the news continues to unfold and we continue to wonder about it all.
Young people, we’re told, are no longer growing up. They’re no longer in any hurry to nail it down, to nail down who they are or where they’re going because life is long and there is time.
Dellen Millard is a young man who was in more of a hurry. And he found much of what he was looking for: money, freedom, thrills. It was by the tail that he had the world and he was racing along with the wind blowing through his hair. Even he must be wondering though, just where he has now arrived with such a thud.
http://www.thomasfroese.com/tim-bosmas-funeral-a-bittersweet-day/