As you go through life you accumulate things. Material items, property, relationships, responsibilities, and assets. Hopefully you do not accumulate some of the bad things like poor habits, addictions, estranged children, broken relationships, debts, and unpaid taxes. My entire life, I have striven to be extraordinary. I had always taken that to mean that I would be exceptional, better than the rest. That was my ambition. Now that I am older, I am taking a deeper look at this word, extraordinary. Is it really what I have always thought, or is it really just extra ordinary?
One concept is certain. If I set out in life to be ordinary, perfectly ordinary, then I would find that to be exceedingly hard to do. Could you imagine maintaining a simple life, with simple needs, and an income stream that was always just adequate, not too much and not too little? Just doing ordinary things on a regular basis, with no surprises. If I set out to create that lifestyle, it would be downright impossible to accomplish. If I tried right now to create that scenario, it would take decades of hard work, and I would not even be assured of getting there.
Even if I were to accomplish such an amazing feat, defending that lifestyle would be extremely difficult. You would have to build a castle, with a moat around it, and never let anyone know about your utopia. For the second that people found out that you were guarding such a treasure, they would want in. How dare you have a calm, sustaining life that is balanced, and live perfectly within your means! The audacity. No, the rest of society could not handle knowingly letting another one of our kind exist in sublime tranquility; we would have to come up with a way to mess it up.
This reminds me of a time when I was in elementary school. The schoolyard girls, who ran quite the political party, were always in charge. They ran things tight and did not allow any detractors, and you were obliged to pay them homage; if you did not, then your experience on the playground would be less than desirable. If you wanted to get picked for flag football, you had to make sure that Julie approved first. I remember that Julie and her friends were building an elaborate sandcastle in the playground. I watched from a distance, amusing myself with the fact that they seemingly did not know that the neighborhood stray cats had been using this as a giant litter box for several years. As they played, in walked Rodney. Rodney, or “Rod” as he was called, did not give a flying flip, that was the expression in the seventies, about sandcastles or playground politics. He was an outsider, through and through. This kid was lucky to come back from home alive every day; the idle threats of privileged third grade girls had little impact on him whatsoever.
I saw that he noticed the elaborate sandcastle setup. He noticed how Julie was taking extra care to line the drawbridge with little snail shells and that her friends were building their tributary kingdoms nearby. I saw Rod processing this scene. Normally, he would not even notice these things. He was typically obsessed with the latest Judas Priest album, or trying to figure out what the teacher meant when she called him a miscreant. I saw him standing there, processing this scene. I assumed that he would just shrug and move on about his invisible life, but this one time he did not. He walked right up and, without a word, trampled the kingdom of one Miss Julie, the monarch of first recess. I remember his boots coming down and crushing the scene with surprising efficiency. That was the day I remembered two things about Rod that I would never see again. He had a bit of white sand decorating the edges of his black trench coat, and he had a faint smile on his face as he walked away. From that day on, I would only see him in dark colors, and never a smile.
As for Julie, she learned. It is really hard to maintain utopia. Just when you think that all is secured, with your soldiers guarding your perimeter and your court gathered around and feeding your ambition, it can all come crashing down in an instant. I did not know it at the moment, but I was observing the brutal and inherent nature of chaos in our organic lives. Yes indeed, if you are ever so lucky to become just ordinary for a while, hold on to it for as long as you can. Those moments of peace are rare, and when they come they are precious indeed. We would be so lucky to end our days labeled as just ordinary, or perhaps even achieving that impossible goal of extra ordinary.
