Extraordinarily Ordinary

I got tremendous response to my post yesterday. It's got me feeling fairly overwhelmed and humbled. I'm not special. I don't have any tremendous insight into the reason(s) we're all here. I just write what I feel. Evidently, posting my thoughts and feelings here has quite a ripple effect.

Few people are fortunate enough to be allowed to see tangible evidence of the difference they've made in others' lives. I happen to be one of those few and it carries with it a heavy weight. As quoted before, from the movie The Freedom Writers, "You have been blessed with a burden, and I envy you."

This isn't an easy task I've set myself to. I began writing here because I needed to hold the mirror up to my own life, shine the light into my own dark corners, not because I see myself as some kind of funky new age gypsy prophet (much as I joke about that, I wouldn't dare to presume to know enough to foster changes in another's world). I'm prone to failure, to moodiness, to all the humanness that everyone else gets to wade through. I just got tired of it. In watching a dynamic man die far too soon, I realized my own damning, mired in the muck propensity for saying, "Someday, I will..."

"Someday" has to be now. I'm the only one who can change me. How can I dare expect to participate in anyone else's life, if I don't fully participate in my own? I'm just me. While I've had extraordinary moments, I live a terribly ordinary life. I get up, I make bean, I shower, I go to work at a very low-end white collar job, and share mindless jibes with my coworkers, I come home, I feed the cat, I eat mostly sandwiches, or soups, or salads for dinner, I mess with the creative junk that threatens to explode my head, I curl up and drift off to sleep. Occasionally I'll get together with a friend and spend time yammering and laughing, usually while just hanging around and drinking some tasty, but low-cost red. I'm just me. But I'm getting pretty good at being me... and I think that's the most any of us can hope for.

The greatest thing you'll ever learn
is to love and be loved in return.
~Nat King Cole, Nature Boy

If I'm set apart by anything, it's my deep desire to love and to be loved. I'm not talking about mushy hearts and flowers love. I'm talking about unconditional love - the kind of love that says, "I am here for you, no matter who you are today." The kind of love that takes any relationship to an infinite level, no matter what the parameters of that relationship are. Simply: I care. And I think I'm here because I care. And because I feel a sense of responsibility toward that beautiful burden of caring. Wouldn't it be nice if such a basic concept was entirely ordinary?

Because... I'm just me.
Every so often a man has a day
He truly can call his
Well, here I am to seize my day
If someone would just tell me when the hell it is

Oh give me my chance, and give me my wings
And don't make me think about everyday things
They're unnecessary
To someone who is very
Extraordinary~Pippin, Extraordinary