Übermensch

So what happens now?

After bumbling through Europe, believing yourself ‘enlightened’ for having spent a week in Asia and once you have exhausted your accent in the States. Then we shall all return to become our mothers and fathers. To settle. To become creatures of habit. To ‘grow up’. To attain nothing but cynicism.
We might find that special someone, or more likely as our biological clocks count down into nothingness - we can forgo the special. Doomed to that inevitable disillusionment eighteen years later. Our transformative years are all but over and we are now set in our ways.
To spawn more life might reinvigorate our own but perhaps also put it into a hopeless context. Yet we will surely fight back just enough to create that hope upon which the human soul feeds. Where might we find that hope? And is to have that hope simply enough?
What good is hope if its only purpose is to prolong hopelessness? What powers do we have to change our lives? To what extent are we simply agents of history, destined only to attain significance should our biological matter be spat forth by the invisible tides that shape us?
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Perhaps it is because I have been stripped of my educational garments and suddenly find myself naked in the eyes of the world, but for whatever reason I have recently been thinking a lot about examples of success. So what follows is a short list of my most favourite people in the world ever. They typically tend to be men and they typically have been successful in two or more relatively distinct fields and I have a special soft spot for those that have excelled in both the realms of politics/social sciences and the worlds of mathematics and science. It is tempting to include figures that were great both in the military and then later in politics, men like Wellington, Napoleon, Lincoln and Hitler. But those two worlds seem so closely linked I fear they may not rightfully qualify for my list.

So I bring to you a far from complete list of my most respected people ever:

Sir Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Branson, Albert Einstein, Theodore Roosevelt, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mohammed, Leonardo Da Vinci, Henry Ford, Ronald Reagan, Josip Broz (Tito), Gandhi and lastly, but far from least – and you know it, the greatest woman that has ever lived: Margaret Thatcher.

Rising stars: Bob Geldoff, Shami Chakrabarti and Jamie Oliver.

My moneys on Jamie.