Ordinary

I set two goals for myself a long time ago: that I wouldn’t be boring, and that I wouldn’t lead an ordinary life. For some reason, these have mattered to me, and I know they matter to some of you. And I’ve been struggling with how to keep these goals.

There’s an inevitable march toward ordinary in our world. When are you going to grow up? Get a real job? Etc. etc. etc. It’s celebrated, in a way. We know that many men do live lives of quiet desperation, and yet we’re told to follow in their footsteps. And I have before–I’ve made that mistake–just to find that it’s not what they say it is on the other side, and the searching doesn’t go away.

I don’t know what it is about the searching, and how it doesn’t go away. Even when you have everything–and maybe especially then. There’s no logical reason to want anything and that’s fine because you don’t want, per se. You long. You desire. You crave to know what’s over that next hill–just one more hill–what’s under that rock, or what’s in that person’s head.

It’s that thing that’s in us, sitting in the chest, waiting for us to give it attention. More, different, better. It pops up whenever it wants and leaves us feeling unsatisfied–always unsatisfied–because that’s the only way it works. If it made you satisfied, it’d go away.

But it does go away, for a while. Long stretches of contentment, fulfillment, and that whole thing. The feeling that you might be figuring it out, and that maybe the need to look will go away. Because everyone’s basically the same and stories are just stories and a lot of the time they have no real grounding in reality. The world’s pretty simple and not all that mystifying if we just sit there and look at it pragmatically. Maybe we can be ordinary. Maybe ordinary’s not all that bad.

The thought can linger, and if we let it, it can take hold. And if we aren’t careful, we end up on the couch with a beer in hand watching the Big Bang Theory every day after work. (Or whatever your equivalent is. I just really hate that show.) We can convince ourselves that ordinary is okay.

So it’s our job to say: no. Fuck that.

That’s our job, and that’s what we’re here for, because that’s the only way anything meaningful happens. And you know it in your heart, but you might ignore it as we all do, because it’s so much easier to ignore it. But what’s the value in easy, anyway?

So no. Fuck that.