I'm not a Mac fan, have never really been a technologically inspired person, and am in fact somewhat of a neo-Luddite when it comes to the inclusion of technology in my life. Hey, I grew up near an Amish community; they rub off on you. All this is to say that when he passed, I was only vaguely aware of who Steve Jobs was, and I was certainly never an Apple acolyte.
It started as I drove to work and listened to the reporting of his death and related venerations for his life on the radio. What I felt then is hard to describe. While my first reaction, thankfully, was sorrow over the untimely death of a fellow human being, it was tinged with an aura of negativity. By the time I got to work, a place replete with Apple enthusiasts, that negativity had manifested itself in my heart as a sort of resentment. Why? Why did I resent this man? "This man's no different than the rest of us!", I said to myself. "What makes this guy more special than anybody else?"
There was a sort of jealousy pervading my heart; a strange, not-at-all-covetous sort of jealousy. His wealth didn't make me jealous. His creativity and effusion of creations did not make me jealous. I began to think that the public outpouring of emotion was the cause of my dark heart only to find that it was not, but was closely related to what I did find. Steve Jobs mattered. He mattered in a way that I likely never will. Oh, I'm not talking about the, "you matter to your friends and family" or the, "you matter to God" sort of mattered. He impacted other people's lives; people he never met. Life was made better for some people because of what he did. That realization, in comparison to my own insignificance on that stage, in combination with his drive and motivation were what was coloring my emotion. But that's not what I learned.
This jealousy manifested itself in a way that I now recognize as being fairly typical of my behavior, though to discover that it was so came as an uncomfortable shock. I immediately began to react to each instance reminding me of his death from newspaper articles to FB posts with a sort of personal equivalency. "Yes, yes, he was a great man", I would think to myself, "but I'm probably just as savvy and capable as he was." The unspoken coda to this impulse was, "and I will be if only..." A miraculous series of self-motivated events would have to happen for that ellipsis to be not so, and that's only assuming that I am as capable or savvy a man as he. And there's the lesson! In order for me to compare myself favorably with Steve Jobs I must overlook the distance between his accomplishment and my own. I must devalue his contributions in order to find equivalency amongst the catalogue of my achievements. I must destroy his accomplishments in my own mind to do anything other than look up at him. And my heart doesn't want to look up at him. My heart wants to be looked up to! Pride my friends, pride.
This effect has caused me to look at some of the great pillars of my appreciation: Mozart, St. Timothy, James Madison, Aristotle and Socrates, Vermeer, and the list could go on. My understanding of my own contribution to humanity has literally come crashing down to shatter at my feet this week. While that no doubt develops an image of depression in your mind, as it does my own, I can now look up though the unclouded skylight newly broken. And I see stars!
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