5-Minute Friday: Ordinary

To be perfectly honest, I've never been accused of being ordinary, though I've frequently been deemed "weird".  When I was an adolescent, this was rarely a bonus, in my mind; standing out, even if it is for reading Longfellow in your spare time, is pretty much every adolescent's worst nightmare.  By the time I was a teenager, however, I decided I enjoyed being different.  I didn't set out to be different for its own sake.  I've never been accused of being a rebel, either.  I was just different, and I liked it that way; I had finally accepted "me".  Another revelatory moment came when I entered college; swimming in a much bigger pond, I discovered that nearly everyone I met was "different".  Ordinary people seemed almost to be a myth, and the few I did meet who probably fit into most people's definition of "ordinary" weren't bad people, or even boring people, they just had different priorities than I did.  Maybe that's a healthy thing.

It's become almost cliche these days to say, "Well, what is 'normal,' or 'ordinary,' anyway?" but for a kid who'd been the butt of more than a few jokes in my little rural Indiana school, discovering first-hand that "ordinary" was a bit of a myth was life-alteringly liberating.  Each of us has ways in which we're extraordinary.  Each of has some area in which we are sub-par.  Ordinary is just the place where we all meet in the middle.  Maybe "ordinary" just means "human".