In these pandemic days that we live in, sometimes I feel a surrealness to life, particularly when I am at home for a day or two then venture out and then remember these extraordinary times we live in as I walk into a store and don my face covering. These are, indeed, extraordinary times.
My musing today, then, is about our awareness of self.
To be ordinary is to be normal, “with no special or distinctive features”. It is part of the human condition then, to seek to be seen, recognised, acknowledged, to contribute more than the ordinary, to be extraordinary at some level and in some ways. However, if I seek to be extraordinary all the time, not only may ego take over, but also the sheer extraordinariness of everything may further see me lose my sense of being centred, grounded, balanced, present.
I therefore seek to strike a balance in life, consciously choosing certain elements of life to be ordinary, then relishing them. As an example, I take pleasure in a morning ritual of coffee in my favourite chair often accompanied by the presence of my neighbour’s cat sitting in his favourite morning spot a few metres away at the top of my small garden. Ordinary, and, when I choose to be present to that, extraordinary in that ordinariness, such that I can choose to sit in presence and even wonder in that repeated moment.
Recently I caught up with a friend on a call and remarked that I feel I am leading an “ordinary extraordinary” life. A simple life, no dramas, a solid base and foundation from which, perhaps, I may seek to add some “extraordinariness” for myself and others.
My thought for you today, then, is that it is important to strike that balance between ordinary and extraordinary, so maintaining both balance and humility.
Closing with some thoughts from Jung on the power of our ordinariness.
Only if I remain an ordinary human being, conscious of my incompleteness, can I become receptive to the significant contents and processes of the unconscious. But how can a human being stand the tension of feeling himself at one with the whole universe, while at the same time he is only a miserable earthly human creature?
If, on the one hand, I despise myself as merely a statistical cipher, my life has no meaning and is not worth living. But if, on the other hand, I feel myself to be part of something much greater, how am I to keep my feet on the ground? It is very difficult indeed to keep these inner opposites united within oneself without toppling over into one or the other extreme.
Carl Jung, courtesy of Ways of Thinking from Linda Berman