14 | Your Ordinary Weirdness is Where You Belong

“Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writers, mystics, painters, and troubadours, for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.”- Jacob Nordby In my six years as an undertaker, I was always struck by the ordinary weirdness of human beings. Eulogies are filled with memories of mundane idiosyncrasies, quirks, and funny habits. These are things we treasure and miss about people. Weirdness is par for the course of humanity. We are all weird in our own way. And yet we learn to fight those parts of ourselves that don't fit the mould. We hide them, judge them, and crush them. In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown defines belonging as “the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us". She says, "because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging but often barriers to it." And then later, in Braving The Wilderness, she described “the quest for true belonging” as underpinned by our “courage to stand alone”. In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we ask how we might nurture the courage to embrace and express our normally weird selves in life. Episode ContentsWhat Makes Us Ordinary is What Also Makes Us Weird | 1.48The Parable of The Blind Men and The Elephant | 6.29Ordinary Weirdness in Everyday Life | 9.33Belonging in The Wilderness | 14.30Self-Belief, Impostor Syndrome, and True Belonging | 21.26Entitlement vs Belonging (True Safety) | 23.32Perfectionism and Conditional Belonging | 26.12An Ode to Imperfection and Ordinary Weirdness | 32.40Stop Caring THAT People Think | 38.44Ordinary Weirdness and The Courage to Be Disliked | 41.44Identifying Our Path - Confidence in How We Go | 48.21The Temple of Dreams | 53.36What is Alive in You Right Now? | 66.14 What Makes Us Ordinary is What Also Makes Us Weird | 1.48 Ordinary weirdness is not something that can be forced. It's how we express our experience of life as the proverbial elephant. The Parable of The Blind Men and The Elephant | 6.29 You may know the story of the six blind men who wanted to figure out the form of an elephant. One man felt its trunk and believed the elephant was a thick snake. Another found the ear and compared it to a fan. The third felt the elephant's leg and imagined it like a tree trunk. The fourth man felt the creature's side and likened it to a wall. Another man felt its tail, believing it to be like a rope. And the last could touch the elephant's tusk, declaring it to be a spear. “We get stuck in the metaphor of language. But it’s really the abstract sensation that connects everything. Art that is sensual goes straight to the ball of sensation that is in the centre of us. It bypasses words. This is what is Real.”- Alex Paxton My friend Alex talked about his relationship with art and its role in his understanding of life. Language is the imperfect tool we use to try to make abstract things concrete. But life is a lot like the elephant. We can feel and describe different parts of it. But none of us can ever capture the entire thing. And even as we define it, we do so with comparisons to other things. So art (and a life of ordinary creative exploration) keeps us moving around the elephant, finding new ways to feel, imagine, and describe it. But we never fully grasp it. Our experience and understanding of reality sits at the heart of our unique and weird ways of seeing the world. This is why there is always another piece to paint, song to sing, book to write, and truth to speak. Ordinary Weirdness in Everyday Life | 9.33 We discussed this in a Haven Kota session and recognised that "weird" is not an easy word for everyone to hold. It can carry baggage if used as an insult or criticism. There isn't a perfect word to describe this ordinary everyday weirdness. We thought about "authentic", but that carries a sense of essentialism,