Normality is a myth

Normal, being normal :

“Conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected”

Being normal is a myth. It’s highly subjective, very personal-preference based. It depends on your point of view, “perspective-dependence”, so to say. Things that considered as normal last year might have been seen as abnormal this year, or maybe things that were abnormal last year are normal this year.

Take online transportation, for example. Not far back we considered being picked up and delivered elsewhere by a stranger is scary, yet now everyone does exactly that. Online-transportation along with its other services has become an inseparable thing of our daily lives. Right now it is considered weird if you don’t use one. It’s weird for you to be confused of getting where you want to be, because life has never been so easy. Everything is just one click away. Salute for Nadiem Makarim for inventing Gojek, the greatest invention of our era! He has made our life much easier while brilliantly solved our traffic-related problems.

Another example is a working mother. Back in our grandparent/parent days, married women who work still get some weird “label” from their surroundings. As if being a working mom is the worst thing ever. And today? Almost every mom I know is a working mother. Spending countless time away from their child is not an easy task yet they did it. They do it whole-heartedly, to the best of their ability. It has become an everyday sight, it has become a norm.

So, normality is a myth. Our definition of normal is constantly changing. It depends on our surroundings. We evolve, our perspective changes, our value shifts. These days we value practicality more than anything (gojek), and teamwork over everything (working mother –red).

So never be afraid of being abnormal (different -red). Because your “abnormality” might not be that abnormal after all, right?

(photo courtesy of google.com)

Comments

The Family Who Read

I was raised in a family who appreciate reading. It’s all started way back when we were young. We grew up reading comic books, our parents often gave us books as our “naik kelas”’s gifts. So we ended up looking forward to books. I remember the feeling when we were anxiously waiting for our packs of books to open, couldn’t wait to read it as we already waiting for it for a long time. And as a continuation of that, by the time we were a teenager, we expand our liking to novels, and our house filled with fantasy books such as “Eragon”, “The Bartimaeus Trilogy” by Jonathan Stroud, books written by Cornelia Funke, “Maximum Ride” by James Patterson and the likes which supplied by our mother. So myself in particular found solace and curiousity in fantasy books. So then we developed our love for books. Growing up, each of us found our own genre, as my brother likes “Haruki Murakami”, me and my father...

Label-free

I mentioned sixth sense in one of my previous post, the “What Should I do” one. True, I stated that the longer we know someone, we’ll develop some kind of sixth sense that’ll help us “communicate” with them. A wordless communication, so to say. That mind reader, gesture-talk kind of things. But I must say that that telepathy is a double edged sword. Why? Because it has its own downside. Opinion. Allow me to quote another saying of Haemin Sunim : “when we think we already know someone, we stop making effort to know them better. Consider when you think you already know your loved ones and when you do, you are failing to see them as they are right now, you see them through the prism of previously held opinions , instead.” Those words quoted from his “Love for Imperfect Things” book, and again, I could not believe how true it is. That “prism of previously held opinions” have an immense power to destroy our relationships because we instantly judge people. We did it in a heart...

Learn to Let Go

Let go; letting go : “An act of letting go; to free yourselves from self-destructive things. Be it a thought, a person, a feeling and anything of the sorts. To make peace with yourself.” Letting go of someone or something truly is not an easy task, so easy to say yet extremely difficult to do. I just had a very tough day as me and my friend shouldered something we shouldn’t have. We got caught up in the middle of something so bad, which may affect our future (in a bad way, of course). A “bad luck”, so to say. We’re just some unlucky dude who got involved in some unlucky event, basically just being in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Same old story. And so I got home, bursting my anger to an (also) unlucky friend of mine and sure enough, I ended up regretting what I did later. As my head start to think more c...

The Little Women

Search This Blog