COTE: A Fateful Encounter In The Past

A Butler's Soliloquoy

I've had this thought on my mind for a while now, but it's been more prevalent in recent times.

What exactly constitutes ambition?

If you go by the dictionary definition, ambition is none other than a thing that acts as the drive to achieve a goal. It acts as a ladder to the future. You see it every day.

'I want to become famous.'

'I want that person to like me.'

'I want to get good grades.'

All of these are goals that ambition can let you achieve. But is ambition really needed to do such a thing? Perhaps it's just luck and talent. If so, is ambition really needed at all? Do people need this invisible drive to achieve something great?

However, I suppose that ambition doesn't necessarily have to be about something great. It can be something small and not that important in the grand scheme of things.

Something such as graduating high school is enough of a goal in which ambition can be used in. In this aspect, ambition isn't tied down to how large the goal is.

Then we have the other aspect, the moral aspect. Is there anything such as a good ambition or bad ambition?

Surely the ambition to harm someone would be seen as bad, right? As I grew up, I had that logic, but now I'm not so sure. People are too grey and multi-faceted to say that this ambition can objectively be viewed as 'bad'.

Morality is relative. It would be nice to have an objective set of rules that can qualify who is a good person and who isn't, but that isn't a thing, and I doubt such a thing will ever be possible. So, I would say that ambition can't be viewed as good or bad.

Although there is a way to describe ambition, without using things as morality or the general size of the goal.

Its strength.

Ambition can be both weak and large. Wishing to achieve a large goal can be viewed as a large ambition, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the individual has a strong one.

A man can have the desire to become president, and that's certainly a lofty goal which needs a large ambition, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the ambition is strong. The drive to achieve something can be much stronger with a smaller goal rather than a larger one.

A person has the ability to work much harder to improve their health, while a person with a seemingly greater goal may not work as hard. The ambition of the second person is much larger in size, but the strength of the first's is much higher.

Now that I look back on my life, my ambition was neither large nor strong. I simply lived my life as the people around me said I should.

'Get good grades.'

'Go graduate from a good university.'

And then, I had no one around me telling me what to do. I was all alone in a world I wasn't able to navigate. I did whatever I could to make money, and that led me to my current place of employment.

I wouldn't say I have a bad life, however. A person like me with little ambition at all doesn't care about much. There are very few people I could say that I actively care about.

I feel like as long as I could keep living as I do now, I would be fine.

I will live like this until I die, that's the conclusion I had come to.

In terms of ambition, I feel like I was born with none. And yet, every now and then, it feels like something grips at me.

Some invisible dark substance, trying to grab ahold of my heart.

And then, it disappears after a while, and everything seems normal.

I tend to think that it's probably just stress, but I don't really know.

Perhaps I'm just dramatic.