Ordinary

I am sitting drinking coffee listening to a song my daughter wrote this week.



The title of the song, is the title of this post. She wrote this song as she goes through the difficult process of ending a difficult relationship. She is so far away. She is right here in her Dad's and my heart. He is weeping, I am weeping. She is so far from ordinary.

Leo Tolstoy wrote "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This is true also of relationships.

I keep thinking back on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of grief in her book On Death and Dying. I read it when I was 17, after my father had died. I refer to it often: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I don't think they have to come in necessarily that order. Denial is the first, acceptance is the last, but I think the individual may work through the other three in different order. She is angry. I think this is her fourth stage before acceptance.

And then this quote from Tale of Two Cities: Dickens writes, "A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imagining, a secret to the heart nearest it!"

We can never truly know what is going on in someone else's heart, and vice-versa. That is the profound sadness of the human condition. Despite sharing this planet with 7 billion others, we are essentially alone.

We are alone, but not ordinary. None of us are ordinary.

We are all extraordinary.

What would your life look like if you walked in the knowledge of all of us being extraordinary?

Maybe we wouldn't feel so alone.

Maybe we would change the world.