Today let me sing a little chant in favor of originality and personal difference.
We live tough times for originality. Our globalized world has turned all ranges of human experience into very standard patterns, so all of us are very alike, and most of passions have become collective. Even in those cases when someone, by an extraordinary combination of luck and effort, manages to get away some steps from the flock, in exchange for the freedom he gets, he is usually forced into quite a solitary and under siege existence (OK, I’ll admit it: that’s exactly my case. But others’ too: just off the bat, I think of the poet T.S. Eliot
That said, I think that the current moment is more suitable to exert personal difference than, say, 20 or 30 years ago. We have come to a point where masks are very much falling, many areas in which a long-sustained hypocrisy is no longer tolerable. The old world has come to an end, that’s a fact, and we are in a standby moment, trying to reach out for the new one. 20, 30 years ago, there was a widespread feeling in the developed world that things were slightly getting better, that this world could stop being a mess if-everybody-did-their-part (cocacola smile here).
Certain expressions, certain behaviors that in those days would have been considered “radical”, “extravagant”, “childish” by the average Joe, are currently common. The “be patient” slogan turned out to be a simple excuse so as not to disturb the cash machine. Now the cash machine has taken the planet to an environmental collapse, bloated the human population to rates far beyond its possibilities of maintenance (and rising), poisoned water, earth and air, and increased the already outrageous gap between those absurdly rich, absurdly fed and absurdly busy, and those who have nothing, nor nothing to eat, nor nothing to do.
In a word: our society is in decomposition. So the answer, if any, is the individual. The building must be built up again from the foundations. And there’s nothing wrong with being a freak in a world where everything is a threat, where there’s nothing to trust but one’s hunches.
We are alive beings; just like any alive being, growth is our natural tendency. Rotten interests, unconsciousness, and an inertia of centuries, have built a morbid maze in our way towards ourselves. It is what we decide to swallow or not what will determine if in our last hour we have become an eagle or we are still in the egg stage. So be a freak, my dear reader. Set an example (man is imitative), there are still a lot of walls to demolish. Answer your mail alphabetically. Walk by the same block twice just because it is sunny, or because you like the sound of your steps there, or because you didn’t notice it is the same block again. Sing your national anthem with some José Feliciano lyrics. Etc. Above all: etc.
Any freak comment here?
Related posts:
More about being a freak
How to become optimistic with very little effort
Nacho and the primal forces
A crisis is an opportunity and we’re losing it
The magic of journaling
