Humility

 

From New York Times

Weekend contemplation

“Don’t be so humble; you’re not that great,” Golda Meir, former Prime Minister of Israel, once told somebody (whose humility was probably nothing more than obsequiousness which comes easily to politicians). Humility is not a common virtue. Really great people possess it because they are aware of their own limitations. One of the requisites of greatness is an acute sense of self-awareness.

The oracle of Delphi was once asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The oracle asserted that Socrates was the wisest. Socrates who was present at the scene refused to acknowledge it and went on to do some research and find out wiser people. He spoke to many wise people and learnt that they were not as wise as they pretended to be. Socrates’s greatness lay in the fact that he acknowledged his ignorance when he did not have the required knowledge while the others claimed to know more than they really knew. Socrates possessed humility. Socrates was great enough to have such humility.

Great people can afford humility. Pride, the opposite of humility, is a self-defence mechanism. Pride is a cover-up for our drawbacks and limitations and insecurities. I was scared to accept my drawbacks and hence covered them up behind a façade that supposedly looked magnificent. But the magnificence was my imagination. To others the facade must have looked hideous which indeed it was.

Great people don’t require such facades. They don’t have insecurities to conceal. They have limitations and they accept them humbly. People like me who have more limitations than skills and are not able to accept the limitations need facades.

Today, as an aging man who has gone through the umpteen tortures that life bestows on people who put up hideous facades of self-defence, I have learnt humility or at least the importance of it. It is not easy to learn that. The facades persist, especially when you have to deal with those who were bent on hammering them down for various reasons.

Greatness is not a necessary prerequisite for humility. I have come across very many ordinary people who possess that great virtue. Such people are aware of their limitations and accept them as natural. They are not grumpy about destiny’s partiality to them. They don’t keep grudges for having less brains, or not being able to sing like the nightingale, or not being contemporary Shakespeares. They know what they are and they are okay with it. They go about doing their jobs without bothering much about themselves, in fact.

Yesh, that’s the point. Rick Warren said it: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”