Normal

Normal.  What a usual, every day word.  And yet, what is normal?  We toss this word about in a negative light, an aspiring one, or a mundane one.  But what is normal if not the pursuance of the things that, at our core, make us human?  To be loved, to Know, and indeed, to love knowing.  To be normal is to exist on a plane that is unbounded by time, emotion, petty disputes or relative notions of society.

What if we strive to do great things because we are compensating for the failures of our life that we cannot escape by any means other than excelling so far above them that they are mere dust in the wind?  Perhaps by achieving those great accomplishments, we feel as if our life has been normalized – the scale is tipped more towards the balance for which every man or woman that has ever lived has struggled, and most struggled in vain.

Consider your own life.  Do you fight against being normal?  How many times have you lifted an upper lip, sneering the word “normal” in reference to breaking the mold of society which, while being the very thing we seek to defy the most, we cannot seem to do without its good opinion of us.  How many times have you – have I – shaken our fist at the Norm saying “I am not with you!”

What is it to be normal?

Maybe normal is a struggle, or a journey.  Maybe normal is not something we see until that fleeting second when life leaves our lungs for the final time, and in that last exhalation we finally understand.  Maybe it is after that.  Or maybe normal is something that we can never truly understand or discover, because maybe none of us are as normal as we would like to think.  Perhaps we are all abnormal in a world that yearns for the opposite.

But that wouldn’t be normal to say so.