Amazing all life’s adventures begin with tea. As I sip my tea at 91 springboards I see one the hub-team waving his hands and speaking in a normal pitch but with no pause or pace, of course for the rest of us it was a few decibels tad too high.
‘Oh! He is a weirdo’
Perfect, now sit up and make a list of everyone who ever called you a weirdo, today is the day to call them and honour them. For September 9th is the Wonderful Weirdo’s Day.
The epithet weirdo is often accompanied by snigger, awe or envy. Who is a weirdo…? Merriam-Webster tells me that a weirdo who is strange or eccentric.
Weirdo a person willing to fly in the face of reason, and common sense. A person of quite some self assurance, since such a person occurs only rarely he must seem eccentric to the rest of us. A person who is eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.
People fear what they do not understand. They laugh to release that fear and feel relaxed. To them life of safety and bore them is seems more comfortable than living a life of mysteries and horror. Somewhere one can learn to appreciate horror, but learning to be weird is not possible-you can only be born weird.
Interestingly the word weird means supernatural, unearthly. Sometimes it is connected with fate, sometimes with a person’s destiny – this information is shared by my bestie Merriam-Webster. However in North America it is an informal word that induces a sense of disbelief or alienation.
We are all strange one way or the other, but when we find someone who also weird, and that weirdness is compatible with ours, we bond or team with them and create a mutually acceptable and satisfying space. It can be called love, or whatever. We also gang up against differently weird people. A little epiphany as I sip my second cup of tea… nothing brings people together as much as collectively excluding someone.
Alain De’Botton claims intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone and find that it okay by them.
In my space people probably have labelled me weird, for conformity to me is being comatose. That having being owned, most of us are closet weirdoes and we wear of mask of conformity. Interestingly the lockdowns have made us face our weirdness and given us the ability to own them.
Being weird makes us the outsider. To be accepted with a community we might have to give up our unique weirdness and conform to the weirdness of that community.
With the aroma of the brewing tea and waft of the spices in it, let’s take a minute to “acknowledge and celebrate the weirdness within us, bless the people who inspire us to think outside the box those who remind us to be a little more true to ourselves.”
To quote Rob Siltanen “here’s to the crazy one, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They are not fond of rules; they have no respect for status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you cannot do is ignoring them. For they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because people who are crazy enough to think they change the world are the ones who do.
To all the wonderful weirdoes… let’s raise the toast; weirdism is the corner stone of many trailblazers. Remember every opinion now accepted was once weird…By the way September 9th also commemorates the birthday of Leo Tolstoy.
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