My precious...

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.