“With great power, comes great responsibility.”- Stan Lee (Uncle Ben)

I don’t mean to always tie my ideas to some totally geeky, but awesome character such as Spider-man or Yoda, but I tend to see connections often in pop culture to reality. Sometimes through fiction (books, comic books, movies…) we can learn hard lessons while having fun. Spider-man was like that for me. I loved him growing up. I was even jealous when my brother got Spider- man underoos (superhero kid’s underwear from the 80s) , and I could only have Wonder Woman!

It broke my heart when Spider-man failed Uncle Ben (I don’t mean Uncle Ben’s rice)  in all his incarnations over the years. I just held onto Uncle Ben’s quote, “With great power, comes great responsibility.”  I know I don’t have super powers, but I defined great powers, as my own strengths. To me it meant if you can do something to help you have the responsibility to do so. In later years I was over stressed and exhausted from taking this idea too far. My husband told me you don’t always have to help, sometimes you can say, ” no.”  I turned to him and quoted Uncle Ben. He said, “Honey, that’s not what that means.” Now this is still debatable. But he did have a point, you can’t always help, if you overload yourself,  you just end up being  no help to anyone.

So I’ve made a small change to the quote, “With great power, comes great responsibility, to always prioritize what you can do to  help to others.”   

Okay it’s not short and sweet, but I do think now I am a better support to others, because I am not spread to thin. I still cannot climb walls,  and I doubt I’ll be designing any web fluid anytime soon. But there is something to be said about using our abilities to help others, while being aware of our limits.

Related articles

• http://marvel.com/universe/Spider-Man_(Peter_Parker)
• Backstory Of Spiderman (lazerhit.wordpress.com)
• Why Education Needs More Radioactive Spiders (creativitypost.com)
• “With great power comes great responsibility” Chapter 3 (bmurphyledger.wordpress.com)
• The Rule of Thumb (thethreebigls.wordpress.com)
• The Golden Rule (corimagua.wordpress.com)
• Priorities (traenenschleier.wordpress.com)