Many hero’s all in one

What is a hero? Should a hero be someone who you aspire to be like? If so, one’s hero could be a famous athlete, Christiano Ronaldo perhaps, or your favourite rockstar..Elvis or Mick Jagger.

Is a hero someone whose life you envy? Should somebody like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk be a hero?

 Is a hero someone whose accomplishments deserve critical acclaim? Maybe then, Albert Einstein deserves to be somebody’s hero.

 Perhaps, a hero should be someone we are grateful for. In this way, a hero could be a dear friend.

I think, a hero should be somebody who has contributed significantly to who you are as an individual. In this way, parents, grandparents, siblings, spouses and even children make great heroes.

But picking ONE hero can be problematic. There’s been a lot of criticism of something called the Great Man Theory, which is a way historians have viewed the world for the last several centuries. In the Great Man Theory, singular people are celebrated for their individual accomplishments, which silences the communities that built these “great” people. It takes a village. Maybe then, in this way, my hero is my community. My city. My country. My culture.  It’s abstract, but perhaps more true. After all, I’m thinking of a hero as something that contributed significantly to who you are.

Maybe then, when selecting a personal hero, we can keep in the back of our minds the notion that any hero you might have, has a multitude of other hero’s behind them, and it is only in the summation of all of these hero’s together that we build individuals up to be the best they can be.

But if all of this is too philosophical…I also really like my dog, Sadie. She’s cute. 

Tim Wilson/MS