We raise our kids from birth almost that they are special, unique, amazing. The message is reinforced at school. The media pick up the path and hammer the message home. If you don’t make your mark and stand out from the crowd, then really you have wasted your life. You are nothing. We then strive to be perfect, seeking to be something more when you already are something more. And end up depressed, numbing ourselves with some addiction, feeling we have failed everyone including ourselves.
WRONG – on every count. We live, breathe and die ordinary. There is joy in just being. Living a life that has meaning and fulfillment is the achievement, being loved and loving in return, feeling, being a part of everyday living.That is the celebration. The post below comes from Jennifer Louden via Weightless. Her thoughts are my thoughts and belief – why re-write her brilliant way of saying it.
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I am an ordinary human.
I hereby wildly loudly celebrate being ordinary.
Average. Making mistakes. Getting C’s.
Here is why I am wildly celebrating being ordinary and average:
because I see a world enthralled to best, a world that increasingly equates being extraordinary with the right to exist.
If you can’t win the reality TV show, make a million your first year in business, write a mega best-selling book, be thin and have a great butt into your 70′s, raise perfect children, have hot sex three times a week, why be at all?
This kind of thinking is deadly in so many ways. It encourages us to be frantic, ashamed, lonely and resigned. And yes, you always have a choice how you react and it’s draining to always have to resist the dominant culture pull.
The push/pull to be EXTRAORDINARY breaks connection and squanders our individual gifts when we need them most.
If we believe being average = being nobody then we never develop the gifts we have, thinking them too average, hum drum, who cares? Simple example: If I try to write this blog post like an extraordinary writer, my writing dries up and nothing emerges.
If we believe ordinary means we can’t impact the world, we fall into resignation, bury ourselves in shadow comforts.
If we believe being average and ordinary means no one will love us or everyone we meet is too ordinary, we condemn ourselves to loneliness.
Perhaps most tragically, when we work so hard to be special, there is no time to be alive! No time to open our arms to the simple, the average, the everyday. Which is where 99.9% of the life happens and where we get to be who we are!
I have no snappy ending or tidy answer for this cultural affliction except to proclaim – with my flabby butt and floppy arms – I am average. I am ordinary. And I am wildly proud of it.
