Allowing yourself to be ordinary

Photo by Heather Wilde on Unsplash

When I was a kid, I thought I was special because I could draw quite well and got a lot of attention for it. When my classmates asked me to draw things for them, I felt a sense of pride. When I entered high school and met people who could draw better than I could, I didn't feel so special anymore.

Many of us spend our lives trying to be great at something. We want to be exceptional—the best. Or we are told that we are special, or not, or should strive to be, or to not even bother trying. I don't think there's anything wrong with having ambition. If you feel compelled to invent new things and make new discoveries, launch yourself into space, then by all means do it—mindfully.

Things get messy, though, when we create a precious identity around our achievements, skills and character. In just one year, I went from being the artist to just another art student. But wait—I was also good at math, until it got too complicated and I wasn't good at it anymore. I would spend the next two decades trying to retrieve that sense of specialness that I had lost.

I'm now 37 years old and, quite frankly, I'm tired of trying to be special. It’s exhausting and it sucks the joy out of life. From time to time, my current painting teacher would ask me: are you enjoying this? It helps remind me that I can do things because I genuinely enjoy doing it, not because I have anything to prove or I need to fill some hole inside of myself.

These days, I find that if I just allow myself to be ordinary, I can sink into a deep sense of peace. For me, being ordinary doesn't mean being the same as everyone else, having no personality, character or value—far from it. I mean ‘ordinary’ in the sense that the leaves change colours in autumn, snow falls in the winter, the cat throws up a fur ball. There is something quite extraordinary in the ordinary if we can appreciate it.

This piece is my attempt at writing a utterly ordinary post while experiencing writer's block.