I was
recently discussing with a dear friend of mine of how most people we know have
some sort of glitch in their personality that makes them slightly weird –
something small, enough to contribute to their uniqueness without making them
appear freaky. And then we all know some people whose behaviour is too much –
too open-minded, too straightforward, too blunt, too cruel, too anything,
really. And we classify those people as freakishly weird because their
attitudes and behaviour fail to fall in line with what we’ve been taught to
expect – and therefore we can’t understand or decode them.
For some of
this people the explanation – when there actually is one – lays in their past,
in something they experienced so intensely that it left a permanent mark on
their personality. Such is the case, for instance, of people who were abused or
otherwise traumatized while growing up. Therapy is often a must for them, to
help them cope and move on with their “normal” lives. But when I think of these
people I sometimes wonder whether normal is
what they should be striving for, or perhaps it would be a better idea to help
them achieve emotional sanity – help them
reach a good point in their lives where they can go on and be themselves –
their happy, sane selves – without worrying TOO much about falling in line with
normality.
But these
people are not the subject of my post. At the moment I’m thinking of people
whose “weird” behaviour stems not from their past but from a certain awareness
of their future – and of how ignorant they are of what it might hold. For most
of us young people the future is something we take for granted – even though we
don’t know what to expect of it, we assume it will be there. Which is to say
that, while we are ignorant of what’s in store for us, we take it for granted
that the store will be open a little longer, giving us all the time in the
world to decide what we want to buy from it.
But it’s
not. That “store” that we normally call “future” doesn’t really sell anything.
It offers. And what it offers is the one thing money CAN’T buy. TIME. Our precious...
Back in my
freshmen year at the university I met a young man who acted “weird” in a
disturbing kind of way. I was not open-minded enough at the time to try and see
beyond that weirdness. The man was simply TOO outspoken, brazen, bold, reckless...
At the time I thought that his behaviour spelled “I don’t give a damn about
what anyone else thinks about me”. I learned later that it actually meant “I’m
really trying to make the most of what I’ve been given – regardless of what
anyone else might think about me”. He died within a couple of months of my
meeting him. He’d been battling leukaemia. I don’t know about everyone else,
but I sure as hell felt guilty, stupidly guilty, for my attitude towards him
and for having been so narrow-minded as to reject him off the bat.
Steve Jobs
died of cancer too. And his behaviour had been weird before that, no doubt
about it. But Steve Jobs didn’t die anonymously, and his status of very famous
person naturally curbed our judgement of his behaviour from “weird” to “eccentric”.
Isn’t that sweetly hypocritical? But that’s not my point. My point is that,
just like the young man I mentioned above, Steve Jobs lived his live the way he
wanted to because he knew that time was short for him. In his commencement
address at the Stanford University, Steve Jobs said: “Your time is limited, so
don’t waste it living someone else’s life” (find the entire quote here). I believe that, at the time he said that, he was
already aware of this cancer. But....
BUT. This
is where I’m trying to make a point. The bitterly humorous saying that “Life’s
a bitch and then you die” doesn’t apply only to people who develop cancer or
other terminal illnesses. Life ends, one way or another. It does, believe me.
And you’re living it now. Not in the past and not in the future. And the reason
you’re still living it is because you’ve been offered time. Some more time. But
just how much, you can’t really tell.
If we can
accept that and we can agree that time IS precious, for each and every one of
us, regardless of our age or health or financial status... then we can start
regarding “normalcy” and “weirdness” in a different light. Living our lives is
no longer a matter of falling in line with whatever is expected of us, but
rather of striking a balance between avoiding an entirely anti-social behaviour
and wasting OUR precious time by living according to someone else’s
expectations.
Personally,
I’m constantly trying to play by the rules – and often failing at it. Because
of that I’ve sometimes been labelled as weird, crazy, freakish, whatever. I’ve
sometimes alienated people I cared about and I ended up hurting people I loved.
I still do it sometimes. It happens. Sometimes I know it will happen and I
still do it. And boy do I give myself huge guilt trips over it. Then I try to
move on, fix whatever can be fixed, and go on living my life. And men, too. I’ve
made mistakes with them, so many I lost count of them a long time ago. Still I’m
moving on. Still I’m not playing by the rules. Will I end up regretting it? Most
certainly. Is there a chance I might not regret it? Maybe. There’s a balance to
be stricken between the two, obviously, but at this point I’m willing to take
my chances, however slim they might be.