Life is a dangerous journey, and, more often than not, ordinary. If life is a movie, it is one where everyone dies at the end. Your only choice is to take the next step, and the next step, and then the next, until the inevitable and final misstep.
My mind always tries to persuade me that I am nothing important as I am right now. I’m like a common acorn. My mind is telling me that the only way I can be happy is if I become a bigger shinier, fatter, acorn, but acorns are only interesting to squirrels. What the squirrels like is not exactly what I was aiming for, if you know what I mean.
Why is it important to me to be important? Am I like some lazy ole lard ass nerd who wants to be a figure skater,but I’m not willing to lose weight, buy some skates and practice like crazy every day of my life. I want what I want, but I want it to be easy, to come to me effortlessly? I’m just me. I’m not particularly talented. I’m not smarter than average. I wasn’t born into money, or to a famous and talented family, so I get no benefit from the light reflected off of my famous talented parents. I am just an ordinary person. Hell, I may be less than ordinary.
There could be some evolutionary reason for my wanting to be famous, or important, or unique. The thing is, if you are famous, important or unique it means you look that way to everyone else. If other people think you are special, then they are more likely to participate in efforts to keep you alive. It’s the old survival of the fittest thing. If humans are to survive they must do what they need to do to live. Being famous, loved, treasured by others makes you, at least in some ways, the fittest.
Maybe my urge to be important, talented, creative, special, etc. is shared by everyone else. The being special stuff may be the very thing that makes me most like everyone else.
It does something else, this I’m special yearning. Wanting to have an extraordinary life causes me to miss out on the fact that even ordinary life is extraordinary.
My mind always tries to persuade me that I am nothing important as I am right now. I’m like a common acorn. My mind is telling me that the only way I can be happy is if I become a bigger shinier, fatter, acorn, but acorns are only interesting to squirrels. What the squirrels like is not exactly what I was aiming for, if you know what I mean.
Why is it important to me to be important? Am I like some lazy ole lard ass nerd who wants to be a figure skater,but I’m not willing to lose weight, buy some skates and practice like crazy every day of my life. I want what I want, but I want it to be easy, to come to me effortlessly? I’m just me. I’m not particularly talented. I’m not smarter than average. I wasn’t born into money, or to a famous and talented family, so I get no benefit from the light reflected off of my famous talented parents. I am just an ordinary person. Hell, I may be less than ordinary.
There could be some evolutionary reason for my wanting to be famous, or important, or unique. The thing is, if you are famous, important or unique it means you look that way to everyone else. If other people think you are special, then they are more likely to participate in efforts to keep you alive. It’s the old survival of the fittest thing. If humans are to survive they must do what they need to do to live. Being famous, loved, treasured by others makes you, at least in some ways, the fittest.
Maybe my urge to be important, talented, creative, special, etc. is shared by everyone else. The being special stuff may be the very thing that makes me most like everyone else.
It does something else, this I’m special yearning. Wanting to have an extraordinary life causes me to miss out on the fact that even ordinary life is extraordinary.
Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim
cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.~ Huston Smith
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