A Requiem for Chadwick Boseman

2020 started off with so much promise. But, once we closed out January with the tragic and unexpected death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi, it feels like the whole year was thrown off-kilter and we’ve been collectively moving from tragedy to tragedy with few breaks in between ever since. You would think we would be numb to it by now, but last night when I heard the news of Chadwick Boseman’s passing, I was hurt. It’s not like I knew him, but like so many of the other people who have passed this year, he was young. All death stings, but the news of a young person’s death forces you to reckon with your own mortality. It makes you start to wonder about things like purpose and the meaning of your life.

During his life, Chadwick Boseman spoke a lot about purpose. In a 2018 commencement speech to Howard University graduates, he stated “purpose is an essential element of you– it is the reason you are on the planet at this particular time in history…” This year, I have thought a lot about purpose and really, about stewardship, especially of our time and talent. I think often we expect that our purpose will come to us as some grand epiphany and then magically light our souls on fire so that we may live in constant service to that purpose. I have come to realize that is likely not the case for most of us. Purpose comes to us in those little moments when we have an idea to say something, do something, speak up on behalf of someone else and then we decide to execute. Everyday that we make progress on those ideas by making productive use of our time and talent, we are living in our purpose. I have come to learn that purpose is not so much a destination as it is an uncharted path. You can’t see where it ends and you can only see a few feet in front of you at any given time. However, if you want to fulfill the purpose, you have to keep walking the path and following where it leads.

So often I think we look at people who have accomplished great things and we are inspired by their lives, but because we think of them (and their accomplishments) in the abstract, we don’t allow their lives to truly inspire us to action. We cannot fully see ourselves in them because we are waiting on the magical moment that will welcome us to the path to greatness. We tend to reflect on their greatness as if they always knew it would be a sure thing. This morning I had the epiphany that most people we see as heroes or trailblazers were just regular people who heeded the call, and that call isn’t always loud or to the thing that will garner us praise from the masses. We think of Chadwick Boseman as the iconic Black Panther, but that was not his first role. I don’t know that Chadwick Boseman knew when he first started his career that he would be so successful as an actor and would have inspired so many people in such a short period of time. I think he might have hoped for it, but I’m not sure he knew. In fact, during the commencement speech, he talked about how he started his career on a roll getting role after role until he landed a role on a soap opera that caused him internal conflict. On the third day of filming, he recalled that he was called in to speak with executives who were very impressed by him and were promising him a long, bright, lucrative future. But, he decided to speak up about what was bothering him. It seemed like they listened, he went on to film that day and did a great job, then he was fired. He recalled that after that moment he had a hard time landing jobs and his agents informed him that he had a reputation for being difficult. Doubt set in. He wasn’t sure if he was blackballed. But, as he reflected, he realized that it was that moment of being knocked down that helped him see what his fight or his purpose was. I am sure that during those early days from the floor, he could not see T’Challa and the worldwide inspiration that character would represent for so many people who needed to see themselves reflected in a superhero. But, he got up and got in the fight and kept moving. And, in hindsight, he was able to realize that his path to T’Challa started with getting fired after heeding the call to speak up when it was uncomfortable to do so.

For many people, 2020 is starting to feel like the end. Maybe the end of the world, the end of democracy, the end of America as we know it. It certainly feels like we are approaching the end of something. However, 2020 might still be full of that promise we were expecting at the beginning of this year. It just might look a little different than we though. Like Chadwick Boseman’s moment of being fired from that soap opera, maybe 2020 is that knockdown moment where we are all on the floor being invited to walk in our purpose. Maybe 2020 is inviting us all to the fight, and this our moment to decide whether we will glove-up and take the swing.