Have an Average Day - Enjoying the ordinary is extraordinary

[BridgeTheGap]

I once was talking to my friend and mentor Steve Chandler when he said to me, “Have an average day!” Taken aback, I asked him what he meant. Isn’t the idea to have great days, even exceptional ones?

He told me a story about one of his mentors, Lyndon Duke, who studied the linguistics of suicide. After receiving doctorates from two universities, Duke began analyzing suicide notes for linguistic clues that could be used to predict and prevent suicidal behavior in teenagers.

Duke came to believe that the enemy of happiness is “the curse of exceptionality.” When everyone is trying to be exceptional, nearly everyone fails because the exceptional becomes commonplace, and those few who do succeed feel isolated and estranged from their peers. We’re left with a world in which a few people feel envied, misunderstood, and alone, while thousands of others feel like failures for not being good, special, rich, or happy enough.

When I was in the thickest cloud of my own suicidal thoughts, I was at university and I remember wishing that I could run away from my scholarship, change my name to Bob, and take a job pumping gas at a full-service station somewhere in the Midwest. Only in my fantasy, people would start to notice something special about me. They would begin driving miles out of their way to have “Bob the service guy” fill up their cars and to exchange a few words with him, leaving the station oddly uplifted and with a renewed sense of optimism and purpose.

I was, to my way of thinking, doomed to succeed. More:

http://tinyurl.com/yron6c

[patrice]

1. That's right. And think how TV re-inforces this message constantly.

And look at anorexia. Suicide through perfection.

I use "Have a good day" all of the time. The buzz/high I hear, and people probably feel, when someone says "Have a GREAT day" is a little too much for me.

[Ellen Forradalom]

2. My life has become gloriously ordinary these past few years

and I've never been happier.

[ProgressIn2008]

3. This is an interesting essay and I haven't really thought of it in those terms

Maybe when your life has been unstable and difficult, the glory of normality is intense. When you've been kicked around, having a safe, warm loving place without abuse becomes a wonderful, everyday exceptional non-exceptional. Food for thought, for sure.

[groovedaddy]

4. Interesting how some people report that it's the extreme events

in life that build character. We may mostly live average lives but it's the trauma and joy that determine alot of who we are.

[uppityperson]

5. Prairie Home Companion syndrome. Thanks for the thought. nt