NORMAL*

Everyone in my class,. from primary school through college,  knew I drove my teachers batty.  Made them nuts that I had so much talent & so little ability, that I could clearly see what was needed to be done & rarely did it or did it well.  Most shared Miss Wilde's opinion, "She'll go far, if she ever gets those little feet on the ground."  


She saw me a dreamer, someone who built beautiful castles in the sky without giving them any foundation to become real.  She, like so many others, didn't begin to grasp that I was simply doing what it felt, from my very peculiar background, WAS normal.  


Normal is an interesting word.  As an adjective, Merriam-Webster defines it as, "conforming to a standard, usual, typical, or expected," but as a noun, it's defined as "the usual, average, or typical state or condition."  So it can be normal for someone to act in very unexpected ways, if that is typical for him or her.  But it does NOT make that person normal within society.

As a person, I am at my most normal whenever I dig & delve to discover more about issues.  At the same time, that very characteristic - perhaps defining characteristic - made me abnormal within a family that seemed equally comfortable with letting things pass, accepting cursory explanations for serious matters or simply turning a well-intentioned blind eye.  


No small wonder that I also drove my family batty - or that I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why.  To me, digging & delving below the surface to get to the deeper reality was as natural, as normal as breathing.  Looking back, it's easy to see that my standard was beyond abnormal to them.  A s-i-l once informed me that I was, in her clinical experience, the most psychotic person she'd ever encountered.  Being me, I immediately set about researching what she might have meant by that, was there any truth to it.  Discovered that, In some core ways, she was spot on ~ if you use our family as the environment in which she experienced me, because in THAT context, my behaviors were way outside the norm.  And, in my opinion, thank god they were!!


Pity my teachers, who didn't grasp that the way I was within the classroom was a perfect reflection of my personal experience & understanding of normal, as learned & modeled back home.  


Just one teacher bucked "standard procedure" and talk directly to me about it;  a new teacher, she hadn't yet become inculcated with the educational norm that teachers funnel such problems via report cards or special meetings with the parents.  Had she acted normally, my parents - acting within their own norm - would have promptly done nothing about it.


What Miss Wilde didn't understand was that, to me, my feet WERE on the ground; that to me, I was acting in a totally normal way.  I never understood why my teachers got in such a flutter over my having great ideas but rarely working them into reality.  


Wasn't the ideal life all about setting a glorious intention?  I didn't dread the grunt work needed to make it happen;  it was more the question of why would I diminish all that potentially COULD be into the mundane of what ultimately was.  


Even now, it goes against my nurtured nature to see forming an intention as a step toward the ultimate goal of COMPLETION rather than as something that would inevitably lead to my own disappointment over the final product.  How much better to have it intact forever in my mind?  Crazy?  Absolutely!!


How abnormal, from society's perspective, that completion was never part of my nurtured nature's normal.  Which is doubly confusing to me, as leaving things unrealized goes against my discovered true nature, which sees oneness as life's goal.  


Oneness - intention resulting in completion, desire reflected in action, even simply knowing what I really want to do.  A lot of that is still relatively foreign to me - there's a long way to go until I master it.  


SGL was totally spot on - we've only got one life, so we need to try like hell to be all that we are.  What a waste of time to be society's standard of normal rather than our own; anything less is a waste of precious energy, so utterly not worth the trip.  


*While writing this very early post - started around 5:30 a.m. - on what's NORMAL, took a moment to check back on something SGL posted on FB, which I'd commented on.  First time I'd seen his own comment on mine, which spun this blog posting into a different direction than I'd expected.  Serendipity!!