Normal is boring

Give your funeral better material

When you’re at a funeral, you’ll notice something missing when near and dear ones speak about those who’ve passed: their normal behavior. No one ever talks about how someone hoed a straight line and played with a straight bat down the pitch. We talk about their quirks. The quaint oddities. That wild thing they did once that surprised us. When you travel across the country to be with your friend at his dad’s funeral, he will tell you that you didn’t have to do it. But he will remember it forever. That you were there.

Here’s the thing: none of us are normal. We’re all weird in our own ways. Most of us spend our lives hiding our oddities and trying to be rational. This makes sense at some level. Being rational has payoffs. Except it’s not so memorable.

What even is normal? It has never been the same thing through time. Emperor Augustus of Rome was the most powerful man in the world in his time. He slept on a bed of hay. That was normal. He and Alexander of Macedonia and Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar never once experienced a hot shower. That was normal. I recently watched a movie about President Garfield. He was shot by a crazy man. As he lay dying, they brought in a half a million pounds of ice and blew air over it to keep the President of the United States cool. They did not have air conditioning then.

This morning, I got up in my cool home, went to my bathroom, brushed my teeth, and had a hot shower. All normal things which were extraordinarily hard or impossible once. You, me and a million others dance on the graves of dead problems every morning in our mundane lives. Problems people once thought would never die. We solved them all.

Here’s a crazy story.

Dostoevsky was 28 when he faced a firing squad. Blind folded. Hands tied, he could hear the rifles being loaded. That’s when the reprieve came. At the very last second. His sentence was commuted. As it turned out, his execution was staged. Psychological torture meant to break the dissidents. It triggered a savage, lifelong epilepsy. But it never broke him. They sent him to Siberia where he worked with criminals. His epilepsy got worse.

When he got out, he was broke. In sheer desperation, he wrote the Gambler in 26 days. He married the stenographer who typed his manuscript. Her name was Anna. Then came the big bang of creativity. Crime and Punishment. The Idiot. The Brothers Karamazov. These are some of the greatest books written in the Russian language. Possibly in any language.

Here’s another one.

Joseph Campbell lived in a shack for five years where he did nothing but read for nine hours a day. This was a man who had no job or income or even a plan. He called those years “the most fertile years of my life.” This was the man who wrote “the hero’s journey.” He spent five years doing nothing this world would call productive. Luckily for him, there was no WhatsApp back in the day.

You can’t have ideas if you don’t read. You can’t articulate ideas if you don’t write. You can’t put ideas into practice if you don’t create. I don’t know why I said this. It seems to fit in this essay somewhere. But I couldn’t figure out where. So I’ve put it here instead of forgetting about it.

It took humans over 2 million years to master fire, build homes, make spears and raise their own food. In the 16th century, something magical happened. We learned HOW to solve problems. The scientific method emerged. And the world has never been the same ever since. Every problem that has ever been solved started with a weird guess. Nothing great ever came out of people trying to be rational or reasonable. You have to be willing to look ridiculous before you’re proven right. Maybe you’ll be proven right. Maybe you won’t. But there’s something to be said for allowing yourself to consider the absurd.

Your death is going to come on an ordinary day, amid unfinished plans and the world will go on existing without you. Go ahead and try something weird. Give them something to talk about at your funeral.

Do write back. The weirdest comment will get a mention next week on the What Ho! Report.

Have a good weekend.