Today I went to the King Tut exhibit at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Just walking through the ten rooms that they set up really took me to another place and time. Clearly, the exhibit itself takes you back over 3000 years, and gives you that glimpse into a world that’s nothing like the one we live in today.
It left me with so many questions. What was it like to be poor in a world where the pharaohs, and I’m assuming the rich, had so much wealth? Was the middle class, if there was one, just enabling the wealthy? How does an economy react to as much wealth as was in Tut’s tomb being effectively destroyed when the pharaoh dies? Have we really advanced as much as we often claim in technology, art, culture?
(As an aside, having just written those questions down, it makes me realize that there are a lot of things that probably don’t change at all…)
On a personal level however, it took me back to elementary school. I was fascinated with Egyptology in third grade. I would actually skip recess to have a chance to go the library, and try to find one more book to read about that world which fascinated me so much. I don’t think I was as passionate about anything in my life to this day as I was about becoming an archaeologist when I was in elementary school.
Remembering that really has me questioning a lot of things all of a sudden. I know that I’m good at what I do today, and that makes me very happy.
However, should I have gone after that dream? Would I have been good at it? I’d still be in school, and I definitely would not have gone to NC State. I would not have met James or Matt who are my future co-founders in waiting. I’m not sure where I would have ended up, but I do know that it would have been doing something that I loved.
I ended up asking myself, and my brother the Philosophy major, do we need to fail many more times than we succeed to say that we’ve even tried.
I don’t know what the answer is today, but I’m going to work through it a bit in my head, and see if I can come back and answer the question. In the meantime, please feel free to share.