Swallowing The Sea
On ambition, risk, and fear
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And so, my friends, we’re winding our way back around to the topic of ambition, finally. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. My ambition has recently outpaced my capacity. In other words, life has overtaken me.
But the question of whether something pertains to our conversation is always simmering on the back burner for me, regardless. Swallowing the Sea1, by poet, novelist, and professor Lee Upton, definitely pertains, though it’s focused specifically on the ambition of writers. Her insights, however, are pertinent for everyone.
In the first book we discussed, All the Gold Stars, author Rainesford Stauffer writes that any examination of ambition requires asking “What is ambition for?” Upton suggests, similarly, that ambition is a word whose focus must be clarified:
The aim of ambition is what matters. We have to decide how to fill the concept and what form our relationship to ambition may take.
Like Stauffer, Upton also seeks to define ambition. Since her book is about writing her definition is concerned, perhaps, more with creative output than anything else around which a person might strive. Still, I like Upton’s definition the most of any I’ve encountered so far. It resonates with my own experience of what thrills and intimidates me about the notion of ambition. Upton defines ambition as “the attempt to reach toward the limit of one’s capacity.”
To reach the limit of one’s capacity is to court the discovery that your limit isn’t where you thought it was; you aren’t actually capable of what you hoped to accomplish. Upton names this “misplaced ambition”, bringing us around to a point that is new for me when considering ambition, which I think is worth examining. Namely, the inextricable relationship between ambition and failure.