Buried under all the recent CoViD-19 news, a variety of natural disasters, and a couple of mass shootings, the really big news was pretty much missed. Last week the 2021 Oscar nominations were finally announced!

I’ve checked out all the entertainment news outlets and I haven’t seen one yet this year but soon, because there is at least one every year, soon there will be an article about some actor who had turned down one of the nominated roles. “I coulda been a contender!”

The saying is “everything happens for a reason.” Maybe it should be. or at least be augmented with, “everyone happens for a reason.” Everyone does you know.  We all have our purpose and that purpose is ours alone. We’ll not do anything just like anybody else and whyever the genes mixed however they mixed when they were mixing to make one of us, there was going to be only one of us. (Thoughts on identical twins still pending.)

The good actors, that is to say the actors who happen to be good people (they are a few) will joke about missing out on a possible award winning role and say, “Oh yeah that could have been me. As the line goes, ‘I coulda been a contender,‘ but I’d not have been half as good.” The rest of them are not so magnanimous. Surely they would have given not just nominated performances but certain award winning performances just because they are they. They are them? It is unthinkable that the hard work and superior skill of anybody else might have actually contributed to one’s nomination.

Bad actors aren’t the only bad actors in the world. We may all have had some moment in life where we made a decision to do or not to do and had we instead not done or done, life may have been significantly different. We fell victim to the shoulda, coulda, woulda syndrome. If I had gone to school, if I had taken that job, if I had played that game, if I had married that person I would be the one with the book deal, the corner office, the vacation home, or the beautiful children. Of course it wasn’t the school or the job or the partner that made any of those things happen. It was the effort of the one in those positions. In truth, when we made those decisions to do or not to do we already set into motion something significant. If our effort would have been great enough to be of value going down one path it also would have been going down another.

Years ago I saw a poster I shoulda bought. I’m sure it woulda made all the difference. I coulda had it on the wall always to remind me to take the right path, which woulda been remarkable because in truth it said I shoulda not take any path. Of course you coulda figured it out by now. It was Emerson’s quote, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Even without the poster (which woulda likely gotten lost by now anyway) I think I figured out that it’s not the role that makes me me. It’s how I fill it.

I’m not a contender. I’m already a winner.