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THE REAL PARABLE OF THE TALENTS
One Monday morning, early… maybe too early…. at the beginning of the world, God gathered together all the people he would someday create. He wanted to distribute to each of them a gift he had so proudly fashioned.
He called this gift: Talent.
But although God had created Talent, he found it had a few strange problems.
Try as he might, he could not make Talent stay in one piece.
He pushed it and tied it and watered it and cut it down and sewed it back and stretched it and glued it and still Talent broke in two parts:
1) Desire. 2) Ability.
Now this was making things difficult. It would be hard enough to give one gift to every person that would ever be in the world, but two gifts to each person would be a big job, even for God.
For one thing, two gifts would take up twice as much space to store. And for another, it would take twice as much effort just to carry them: it would cost twice as much money, and it would take twice as long to give them out. Now time was not something God had a lot of, considering that contrary to popular belief he did not reside in heaven, but in a place a lot like New York City, which was why he was such a grouch and why it was important that he just get on with the job fast, using the least amount of space he could get away with.
How best to give out this gift of Talent soon became a major strategy issue for God.
Eventually it was the only problem he could think about. And as we know, if enough attention is given to a particular problem, a solution has a good chance of being found.
And so it was with God.
"I've got it!!" he said.
"I'll take these two pesky parts of Talent---1) Desire 2) Ability-- and grind each of them into a single magic dust that I will sprinkle over everyone at once. This will be very quick, it will only take up the space of a big bucket and it will save a lot of money."
So he did.
And mysteriously the two parts of Talent---1) Desire and 2)Ability—that had given even God so much trouble were ground together in big bucket of dust.
But even then, Desire and Ability did not exactly become one, because—lo and behold!—the Talent Dust turned out to be two different colors. Ability turned into a rich teal green and Desire was a shimmering magenta.
"How pretty," God thought.
Soon all the people who ever would be in the world were gathered in front of God, who stood on a ladder so he could see everyone, and also so he could throw the Talent Dust over all their heads.
"I'm going to throw Talent Dust over your heads-heads-heads," God announced into the squeaky microphone, "and to help me-me-me I've enlisted the services of my friends Breeze and Wind-wind-wind."
A great murmur of anticipation rose up from the crowd. "Here goes-goes-goes," God said into the microphone as he threw a handful of the teal and magenta Talent Dust over the heads of the crowd .Breeze and Wind did their jobs too, taking the dust a little way and far. God did this many times, each time saying into the microphone, "Here goes-goes-goes."
Soon it became apparent that the dust fell unevenly.
Some people got an equal combination of the teal and magenta dust, which gave them both Ability and Desire in equal proportions.
Some were standing under only the sprinkles of teal and got Ability, without Desire.
Some people were either too far away or too close and got no Talent Dust at all.
And a rather large group was covered only with magenta dust, leaving them with the undiluted Desire to create, but no Ability at all.
"There!" said God into the microphone, "we're finished----now go your way-way-way!" Then God got off the ladder and went back to his neglected work of juggling the elusive formula for Happiness.
But from then on when people came into the world they brought with them the sprinkles of Talent Dust which had or had not reached them when God threw it. But of course no one could see this right away.
And as time went on it became clear that the happiest people on earth were those who got no dust at all.
Or both the magenta and teal dust in equal amounts.
In the first case, those whom the dust missed completely had no Desire to do anything whatsoever that required Talent and so never needed any of the Ability they would never have. This spared them from a very unpleasant life.
In the second instance, those who had both Talent and Ability in equal measure did wonderful things for the world and we all still know of them to this day and they have made all our lives a little better, which is probably what God intended for everyone before he did such a bad job of getting that dust spread evenly around. Now when I say these people sprinkled with both the Ability and Desire parts of the Talent Dust were happy, I don't necessarily mean that you could know they were happy by looking at them.
Sometimes they seemed miserable.
Often the world treated them very badly because it did not always know they were doing good things for the world. And sometimes they might even doubt it themselves. But deep inside there was always a special little fire that never went out and always lit their way, however dimly, in their darkest times. And this fire was the cause of their strange happiness because it let them see why they were alive, when many other people couldn't figure it out even if they thought about it.
Now those who got sprinkled with only the teal Ability dust, but not the magenta of Desire, were not so bad off, either. It was a waste for the world, of course, that the Ability these people had would never be used for good, or beauty, or understanding. But they had no Desire for any of that. No skin off their noses, as they say.
But the poorest, unluckiest, most wretched creatures in the entire universe were surely those who had received only the magenta dust on their heads. They were stuck forever with the Desire to create but none of the Ability. They knew they Must Do, but were Unable To.
How unspeakably sad these people were. Their desire, their passion, their lust to forge something of value would often force them to spend lifetimes working, slaving, sacrificing. And yet each thing they created was ordinary.
These people all spent a great deal of energy on things that made no difference in the world. If they created something, it had no meaning. If they didn’t create it, that had no meaning either. Sometimes they would create something the world thought it loved, but would then immediately forget.
They knew all this meant there was something very wrong with their lives, but they couldn’t figure out what. They thought if they just tried harder, it would all work out. They thought it was their fault. None of them seemed to know their fate had been sealed Before Time: that it was simply a toss of the Talent Dust that made them the way they were.
And no matter what they did, they always felt their own failure. They suffered from failure even if they found love. Even if they had children. Even if they made money. They suffered from failure even if they were happy.
None of the other people caught in the dust distribution system—and that was everybody else in the world—suffered for these reasons. It was only those with Burning Desire and No Talent that had paradox, and therefore pain, built into the very definition of who they were. In a world overflowing with the sad and unlucky, these people made up a tribe of unfortunates of their own particular kind. They were strange and annoying, even to themselves and each other.
One of the most annoying, and certainly unhappiest, person was Arthur. He had an especially acute sense of what talent was. When he saw it his body would shake and tears would fill his eyes. Fortunately for him, he didn’t see it that often.
“That’s it!” Arthur would say to his friend Morris, who had gotten No Dust At All.
“That’s what I must do! See? It can be done! And I must do it!”
“Uh, huh,” Morris would say. Morris never understood the choices Arthur made with his life. It seemed to Morris that Arthur was only interested in leaving space and waiting.
“I always have
to stay ready,” he told Morris.
“For what?” Morris would ask.
If Arthur and Morris were at a museum, Arthur would tell Morris “I can do that.”
If they were at the theater, Arthur would tell Morris “I can do that.”
If they were at a science fair, Arthur would tell Morris, “I can do that.”
If they were at a political rally and heard that even one person could change the world, Arthur would tell Morris, “I can do that.”
Arthur never did any of these things. But he always stayed ready. “I was meant to lead a remarkable life,” he told Morris.
In that case, Morris wondered, why did Arthur do only unremarkable things?
But Arthur was so serious—actually somber, in fact --about all this, that no one, least of all his friend Morris, had the heart to tell him that he had obviously gotten only trace amounts of Ability dust mixed in with the unusually large portion of the Desire he was cursed with.
It seemed to everyone who knew him that the dust of Desire and No Ability was making a fool out of Arthur. Yet…it also made him heroic in a strange way. It’s the brave who insist on going forward with lost dreams.
So Arthur, poor soul, kept on going.
He would do a little something and think he had a great gift, especially when compared to people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do anything at all. But deluding himself like this did not help. Because each time he tried to create some little thing, it would be the beginning of misery...of a nightmare in which he was trying to go somewhere and his destination kept moving further and further away, and the more he urged himself “a little more, a little more,” the more he would get heavier and heavier and pulled down, deeper and deeper, until he had to settle to stay where he was.
Then he would tell Morris, as he always told Morris, “Oh, this didn’t turn out the way I wanted, but next time it will…”
It never did.