Becoming a Person
When I first met my partner Julie, almost thirteen years ago, I remember telling her that my greatest fear in life was that I would turn out to be “mediocre”. She looked at me and said, “there is only one thing that is mediocre about you and that is the way you’re dressed. But we can fix that. Just give me your credit card.” And Julie has done a great job of improving my wardrobe over the past ten plus years. But my point is that I had a dreadful fear of mediocrity, of somehow being like other people, being average and unremarkable; I felt like I would do anything to stand out and be different.
Recently, I have begun experimenting with dropping all need for specialness. I can see that there is a small child in me that wanted love and attention in a crowded environment (four older siblings) and that a large part of my motivation was not a spiritual need to express my unique being (which is how I had explained this unrelenting drive to express myself uniquely) but a psychological need to earn love. What if I am perfectly love-able and I am not doing anything particularly extraordinary? What if I am going to the laundrymat (we are renovating our home and our washer and dryer have been offline for several months), and I am as ordinary as ordinary gets, and I have no need to stand out in any way? (As an important aside, it is always so interesting to me when I uncover something that has psychological roots, like this need to be extraordinary in order to receive love, and to notice how I have been operating under a spiritual justification, in this case that I have been focused on expressing human uniqueness).
So I have been experimenting with enjoying the ordinary, not solving any big Sounds True problems or making “big deals” or creating a big splash of any kind. And I am noticing that I am happier than I have ever been. I am relaxing into being one of six plus billion people and simply being “one of us.” I don’t have anything to prove or anything to earn. Instead, it is about being present to what is needed and asked in the moment without a big agenda. I feel like a person instead of a striving determined-to-be-extraordinary achiever. And what I am noticing is that the glistening of the trees is brighter, the fur on Jasmine’s back (Jasmine is our 16-year old cocker spaniel) is even softer, and that I really enjoy going to the laundry mat!
