How did you become who you are? We all start as a nameless soup of chemicals, some self-catalyzing. For all the characteristics we share as living beings, each of us are nonetheless individuals with our own quirks and characteristics. The better we get to know one another, and what we generally know about each other is not much at all, the odder we seem.
We fill the gaps in what we know about others with speculation, assumption, projection and fantasy. Each of us inhabits a subjective world of our own making, and the best we can do is compare notes with each other to arrive at what we describe as objective reality, using science for example. We make distinctions, agree on names and the rules associated with them, but the entire intellectual and cultural framework of human society exists in our minds and without us disappears – pop! – like a soap bubble. It begs the question: what’s real?
No single object is real; it exists only in relation to something else; that’s a pretty thin skein of reality. Nevertheless, every thing existing in relation to every other thing forms a seamless net of co-emergence in the holistic fabric of spacetime. As the mass of an object affects everything else in the universe in minor to major ways, no thing and none of us exist in isolation. You’ve gotta like that in a universe.
Life is hard work; for us, there are no short cuts. Sure, some people are born luckier than others, welcomed into loving families with plenty to eat and a warm place to call home, but even that’s no guarantee that everything will turn out fine. The curvature of spacetime insures nothing but curveballs. In the short time each of us enjoy, we have to figure out how to make it work, and that produces great variations in the ways we live and behave. Life does not come with an official operating manual, just all sorts of opinions.
The essence of life is unpredictable; it’s the origin of novelty, and novel is what we human beings are. It took a billion or more years for the novelty of humanity to arise, just a drop in the bucket of time when it comes to eternity. And that means you are currently among the most novel of creatures, existing ever so briefly in the historical lineage of living things that wends its way back to the very beginning of life on this planet, the sum of billions of years of unpredictable evolution.
So of course you’re odd and thank goodness for that. Were you not odd, had the unpredictable circumstances of your emergence not happened, well, you wouldn’t be here at all. In this way, everyone is odd, the outcome of stupefyingly obscure probabilities that created you and the possibility of novelty. And on top of that, it’s still happening to everything everywhere all at once.
We’re all surfing a continuously cresting wave of universal creative evolution as old as time itself. Can you feel it, the urge to keep your balance and not get thrown into the uncertain choppy waters of becoming? That’s where the work comes in, finding the sweet spot that lets you safely navigate through life, and even find moments of exhilaration and joy while doing so. That’s also where the oddness of you comes in, the brilliance of your novelty. Hang ten, baby.
