There is a kind of ambition that refuses to stay small. Mine is bound to my country. I think often of my nation standing free—free of poverty, of political corruption, of all the other harms that have been allowed to take root. I want to help her there. I want it so much that the wanting never really leaves me.
I also know what such a wish asks of a person. To serve a nation in that way, you have to be a good leader, and a great one. Leadership of that kind is demanding. It asks for presence, judgment, endurance—for a size equal to the work. Every serious ambition meets that question, sooner or later: am I equal to what I have set my sights on? The question is not a reason to turn away. It is part of the path.
I dream of that work all the time.
Toussaint Louverture. Chromolithograph published by George DeBaptiste, c. 1870. Public domain. Library of Congress, Washington.
When I look at this portrait of Toussaint Louverture, I am looking at the measure of that dream. The print, a chromolithograph published in Detroit by George DeBaptiste around 1870, shows the great leader of the Haitian Revolution at head and shoulders, turned slightly to the right, wearing a robe. The face is calm. The presence is unmistakable. Here is the leader who rose from bondage to command a revolution, and who still stands, for me, as the shape of the man I would like to become.
The Voyage of Life: Youth. Original by Thomas Cole, 1842. Public domain. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Thomas Cole painted that wanting in 1842. In The Voyage of Life: Youth, a young man has taken the helm of his own boat. Ahead of him, a castle rises in the clouds—an air-built palace, the shape of a future before it has been tested. The river appears to run straight toward it. Cole lets us see what the boy cannot: at the edge of the canvas, the water begins to bend toward rock. But Youth does not look there. He looks only at the castle. That is how the dream arrives in me. Bright. Complete. Already waiting in the distance.
The Voyage of Life: Manhood. Original by Thomas Cole, 1842. Public domain. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
In the next painting of the same series, Manhood, it is the same traveler. The castle is gone. Storm and cloud close over a hard landscape, and the boat is small in the rapids of a gorge. The helm has been lost. Cole's voyager looks upward, as if the trouble around him had grown larger than his own strength. I know that scale. I know what it is to feel dwarfed by the thing I am steering toward, and by the resistance I imagine waiting for me there.
Look again, though, at what Cole placed in that same storm. The helm is gone; the voyager can no longer steer by his own strength alone. But he has turned upward—toward hope, toward faith. Above him, through a break in the clouds, a guardian figure watches over the passage. And the river has not stopped. It runs on through the rapids, toward a lightening of the sky and gentler country at the foot of the gorge, and then toward open water. In the last painting of the series, the storm is behind him, and the waters have grown calm.
The paintings offer a different answer than the one I first carried. I used to think that certain dreams ask you to be large already, before you arrive—that you must be big enough for the work before you begin it. There is some truth in the weight of that thought. A great aim does ask a great measure. But Cole's voyager is not large when the storm meets him. He is simply still in the boat. The river carries him through. You do not have to be big enough before the journey. The journey is what makes you.
Toussaint Louverture was not born a general. He became one. The presence in that portrait was made in motion, not granted at the start.
I have not arrived anywhere yet. I have not tested the full measure of the work I want to do. What I have is a direction, and a decision: I will not wait until I feel already equal to the dream. I will enter the river, and let the work itself teach me the size it requires.