An Idea of Normality

For years I dreamed of being normal. Recently this idea of being normal dropped away. It had been something I aspired too for as long as I can remember. To be a respected member of society with the house, the car, the two point four children and the wife. To me whilst I was seeking, I dreamed that I would go back to a normal life after finding my answers. But what was normality for someone who had never experienced it. I remember a line from my book Falling into the Mystery

I can hear my family in the next room laughing and joking and I envy them. I just want to be normal but I have no way of knowing what normal is anymore…

So how can someone who has never known normality know it, and this was something I struggled with for many years until as I said, I found the idea just dropping away. The corresponding sense of freedom I experienced in this letting go was freeing as it pointed to a level of authenticity I had yet to experience. It is ok to be as I am and to accept that I am who I am. I am someone who has spent a large portion of their life looking for the answers to life. Now, however life is lived and not looked for. I am no longer in the ashram but instead I am in the only ashram that matters, Life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music…’

Life with all its imperfections and craziness has taught me that in order to truly live I need to embrace every aspect of me and that also includes this spiritual side that I hoped to drop when I had found my answers. If anything this realisation of being as I truly am has given me a better understanding of what it means to be truly normal as opposed to an idea of it, than if I had chosen to reject a huge portion of my life in the hope I would fit in with the Joneses.

That by embracing every aspect of us we are so much more whole, complete and richer for it.

That we can find the miracle that is life while standing in the queue at the supermarket as we can find it in the presence of the greatest of sages.

That by embracing what others may see as our weirdness, our quirks, our little oddities that probably amuse the “normal” folk who haven’t lived as we’ve lived that we are more normal than those we seek to be like.

To quote Oscar Wilde:

Be yourself, everyone else is taken…

Embrace and accept all aspects of you and you may find that your embracing yourself helps you see the extraordinariness of it all in the ordinary and that this acceptance of yourself is true normality.