Toward Being Ordinary and/or Extraordinary.
Which one of these two would you rather be:
• One who makes extraordinary things look ordinary?
• Or one who makes ordinary things look extraordinary?
I posted these questions on my Stories — both on WhatsApp and Facebook — and they were responded to from various perspectives and by varying persons of varying demands. My intention was — and still is — to capture the many sides an individual can be triggered by the question, and to emphasize the consequential relevance of this uniqueness in the way we think, speak, respond, act and execute.
There is now a need to address the issue of subjectivism, especially in a post-truth world. Many issues, norms, and more are currently warring due to human individual ability to accept and to evade — either by creation or recreation — the existing and the new. The world has never experienced a proliferation of ideas, thoughts and theories as it is currently witnessing. There is an explosive revolution ongoing in almost every walk of life, briefly mentioning: sexual revolution, gender revolution, trade and development revolutions.
Under sexual revolution alone, there are as many openly confessed sexual orientations now than they were in the past. We have now — and it is important we get familiar with these — sexual orientations like pansexuality, asexuality, allosexuality, androsexuality, demisexuality, sapiosexuality, and other forms of sexuality — all revolting for acceptance and identification. In addition to this, sexual revolution seeks to justify the use of contraception, the legality of abortions and the indulgence of humans in premarital sex. Unsurprisingly so—
On April 1st, 2017, concentrating on Science and Technology, the BBC Future published a list of fifty (50) grand challenges facing or that are to face the 21st century. The list was sourced from the opinions of experts from around the world on what they considered were or would be globally confrontational in 2017 and beyond. This exhaustive list included artificial intelligence, energy, cities and global development, health and humanity, and the future of the internet, media, and democracy.
The question therefore is: What could be responsible for these many challenges and revolutions? Could it be the advent of social media, the technology of things, the prophecy of long-forgotten scriptures, or the rise of Trump and Putin?
In 'Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow’, Yuval Harari remarked that since humans have secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health, and harmony (through curiosity and imagination), the next targets would be immortality, happiness, and divinity as humans aim to overcome old age and even death itself, make people positively happy (from the effects of technology), and upgrade themselves into gods. All these, however, Harari was quick to note, are the results of subjectivism and the decision of humans to have either made ordinary things look extraordinary and/or extraordinary things look ordinary (through the use and effective application of fiction).
From any aspect that a person has however decided to respond to this dualistic question of extraordinary and ordinary above, there is no denying the fact that the question is indicative and serves as a major factor to individualism and to the very nature of how humans decide to see themselves, be indoctrinated and would want to interact with objects and feelings. Individualism is, in fact, the most significant ingredient in concocting curiosity and imagination.
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So when I posted these questions to my stories and the answers were quite unique from one respondent to another, it didn’t come to me as a surprise. Among the seven (7) generated major responses*, three respondents preferred making ordinary things look extraordinary, two went for making extraordinary things look ordinary, one would love to have both in his interaction with objects and humans, and the last was inconclusive as the questions, according to her, 'depend on the situation of things’.
Paulo Coelho, however, appears to have lent credence to the first of the two questions when he said 'the simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them’.
His quote re-echoes the response of one of the respondents who commented 'Ease' as a reason for choosing to make extraordinary things look ordinary. The respondent believes that with ease, simplicity is made manifest and that with a sense of mutuality and belonging, the inherent natures of things, beings, and feelings, expose themselves in their most extraordinary features. This sense of mutuality and belonging is what another respondent describes as consistency. It’s more like being an alchemist, befriending the soul of the universe until the most inherently extraordinary things we do, we see, feel and touch, tend to appear ordinary in the eyes of the universe.
Conversely, Jim Rohn seems not to agree with this view when he opines that 'Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well’. On a closer look, one may be tempted to think both Paulo and Jim are thinking in the same direction, but they are not. Paulo emphasizes on the ordinary things being extraordinary in themselves, Jim, on the other hand, argues that the ordinary is made to look extraordinary and so are not extraordinary in themselves, and that, to him, is success. While Paulo’s standpoint is existential, or rather scientific, Jim’s perspective is art and corresponds with the response of yet another respondent.
In conclusion, both the practical and the theoretical aspects of life forge our ways into different natures that could be challenging and revolutionary. The fate of the new world will, subsequently, be shaped by the extent to which we deem ourselves either extraordinary of things in ordinary look or ordinary of things in extraordinary look. These questions do not only decide the future part of us but also manifest themselves in the way we think, observe, act and engage with others whose perceptions about life may be similar or different from ours. And we can only properly understand ourselves and the universe when we agree that the larger picture of these questions is not in how we happen to be ordinary or extraordinary from the look of things, but in how we actually make things look, whether ordinary or extraordinary.
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Photo Credit: AdventureInYou
Asterik*: Gratitude to respondents — my friends — who decided to share their views with me and granted them publicity. In no particular order: Sulaimon Fawaz Kolapo, Adam Shuaib, Habeeb Damilare, Bude Aishat, Adebayo Dave, Abdusalam Aladodo, and Owolabi Temitope Mubaroqah.
