Trying to Not Be Like Da Vinci

Seeing as my middle name is Aldous, I find myself all but obligated to write about the Brave New Worlds of the renaissance and how they relate to my life. However, “all but obligated” does not constitute full obligation, and so I’ve chosen to write about the Sprezzatura of the renaissance and how it relates to my own struggle with self-direction.

Letting go of my renaissance man perfectionism lets me enjoy the beauty of life, even if there are some errors along the way.

From a very young age, I’ve had a deeply embedded desire to be good at everything. This urge showed up early in school and spread to other aspects of my life: sports, music, social events, video games, literacy, you name it. If any activity had any aspect of “being good” to it, I needed to be near the top. In some sense I was inspired the by famous Renaissance Men like Leonardo da Vinci and Ben Franklin. If they could be good at just about everything, why couldn’t I?

While this striving for complete excellence led me to success through and out of high school, it also caused me some self-doubt and almost guilt. At times, pure leisure seemed like a crime, a waste of the limited time that I had been given. Even if I was doing something good, was it good enough? Was I losing out on other opportunities to grow personally or better the world around me? I often felt torn apart by these questions as I failed to measure up to the ideal I had created in my mind. Pivotal decisions like what to major in and who to marry were complicated by a feeling of fear that by choosing one path, I was somehow limiting myself in a hundred other ways.

In the last few years I’ve learned that nothing is more limiting than being pulled and stretched far beyond my capacity. Instead of acting like a dog chasing every random car it sees, I need to be thoughtful about what I choose to do and what talents I choose to develop. We all have limited physical, mental and emotional resources, and we need to be deliberate about how we use them. So, while I still admire the renaissance ideal of a perfectly well-rounded individual—a living embodiment of Sprezzatura—I no longer need to become such a person. I find more peace and satisfaction in cultivating the core elements of myself and my relationships.