In Celebration of Being Ordinary

Apr 24, 2013

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.

Nice to meet you.

Jettison Self-Doubt and Lose the Itty-Bitty-Shitty Committee and Make Your Thing Now

From the national best-selling author of The Woman’s Comfort Book and Why Bother.

Made for writers, artists, mail art makers, knitters of sock puppets, creative entrepreneurs, photographers, Tarot readers, and anybody who needs to make stuff they love.

I’m not one of those creepy people who make it hard to unsubscribe or email you again nine years after you’ve unsubscribed. Giving me your email is like a coffee date, not a marriage proposal.