The Delightful Surprise In Being Ordinary

Since I can remember, I wanted to be special. There’s nothing unique (or special!) in that. I know many of us have wanted the same thing since we were kids. To be singled out for praise. To rise above the crowd. The crowd in class at school, the crowd in sports teams, the crowd in family gatherings. Special in being smarter, stronger or funnier. In some countries, it’s culturally frowned upon to want to stand out from the crowd of the population. Within me, it was a feeling I craved. It drove me academically in school. And in my dreams of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Yeah – dreams of fame and fortune. All that stuff. I quit anything I could only be average at. If I couldn’t be special or even exceptional, then what’s the point right?

I’d like to say I’ve grown out of it. Maybe to some extent, I have. But it’s been playing in the subtle shadows of my mind and behaviours all along. When I’m on a long-haul flight, I check to see if the in-flight entertainment has a trivia game. If it does, I’m on it – with the ambition that by the time we land, I will have the new record-high score.

Ok, that could be my competitive spirit, but I know myself well enough to realise it’s more than that. It’s wanting to be special.

About 8 years ago, in the Pacific Northwest during a talk one of my mentors was holding, he brought up the delights of being ordinary. I was confused. ‘Delights?’ What’s so delightful about being ordinary?

I stayed in the seminar room physically. Mentally I went out and away. Now, trusting my mentor as I did, my mind did come back to join my body on the chair. I suspended my confusion and went back to listening.

“What can become available when we realise we are just ordinary…” he said and paused. My head dropped forward. I stared at the burnt orange carpet on the floor. The back legs of the chair in front of me made darker indentations where they met the pile. My black-shoed feet pointed straight ahead and they joined in darkening the carpet to the right, blocking the light from the late afternoon sun that came in low through the windows along the left wall. A scrunched-up blue post-it note lay behind my right heel.

“…What’s available is a deeper connection to the oneness we are all from,” my mentor went on to say.

I looked up. Then closed my eyes. My head couldn’t wrap itself around that. Yet something else in me knew he was on to something. He carried on talking. I stopped listening again. I stopped listening to him, and I stopped listening to the chatter in my head.

In the quiet, a feeling opened up. Words can’t convey it. But words are all I have, so I’ll give it a shot: I felt complete. My mentor’s words of ‘deep’ and ‘oneness’ had resonance. Not the cognitive resonance of agreement. The resonance of a vibration that shut both my ego and my overbearing intellect down. The light in the room became more vibrant. I was seeing in hyper 3D, no, deeper. I was seeing in 4D. That ‘separate self’ disappeared and it felt amazing.

It lasted for a while, then faded. But I remembered it. The ‘knowing it was there’ has stayed with me since that afternoon 8 years ago.

Fast forward to a few Sundays ago. I was in a different seminar room, in a place far closer to home, with a different mentor. Both mentors had learnt directly from a man called Sydney Banks who had an enlightenment experience back in 1973. They have a collective 95 years of experience in sharing a deeper truth into what it is to be human, and to how the human mind works. Both have become friends and continue to be people I love to listen to.

In the afternoon, the speaker brought up the notion of ‘ordinary’ while answering a question from one of my fellow audience members. As I was listening, I got distracted by the memory of being in Prague last month and my wanting to feel whole. This is looking in the same direction, from a different angle. Ordinary. That feeling came back from 8 years ago as all my thinking of being separate fell away. I closed my eyes. And felt it more. Connected. To everything and everyone. Everything comes from one formless source. All one. So alive!

“This feeling is so much richer than any feeling of special,” I said to myself. All the ways my separate egoic self had been searching for feeling ‘special’ by achieving more or having more – the best that ever brought was a temporary respite from insecurity. And bought into the illusion of a separate self. Ordinary – this brought feelings I could only have imagined.

The most special of feelings that arise when I quit trying to be special.

Back to the true oneness that is home. Always.

And is only ever one ordinary thought away.

With love and thanks,

Wyn