The enemy is not fear, but the intimidation. Fear spurs you to dig for the extraordinary within you and achieve it! An overriding fear that afflicts most of us is the fear of being average.
To score in any test or to be called ‘one of the crowd’ is anathema to our very being. Nobody wants to be an “also was…” and most of our struggles are directed towards proving how different we are from ‘others’. The internet is inundated with bloggers expressing this fear; everyone wants to be extraordinary, nobody wants to live an ordinary life and die unsung.
One blogger says he doesn’t want to “blend into the crowd, not be a person people meet and immediately forget”…. Another puts it more graphically, “Living the average life everyone else does - ****ing the same girl for the rest of your life, having kids, getting married, 9-5 job, sitting at home in front of the TV, getting fat, doing the same **** week in -week out. Are you OK with slipping into that category and settling with it?” And yet how different can one be? As my son asked a couple of days ago, “Mom, why is everybody’s life the same? We are all born, learn to talk/walk, go to school, college, get a job, raise a family, and then die….?”
My first instinct was to give him the spiel of those who leave ‘footprints on the sands of time,’ but then I never really have understood how it would help a person to be remembered after he is dead and gone!? And if you believe in reincarnation, can you not visualize a scenario where a great historical figure is reborn as an “average” man and forced to read up about himself and memorise the dates he made noteworthy in his past birth! What irony, and one he wouldn’t even be aware of! What price then his having been “above average” or “different”? And so, instead, I spoke to my son about the need to make a difference, not because one would be remembered for it, but because it gives one immense satisfaction to have lived a life that is worthwhile, one which would help us reach the higher echelons of spirituality. How different would the history of the Ambanis and perhaps that of the Indian industrial scene have been had Dhirubhai not chosen to follow his dream and take it up as a mission! As the Ambani brothers said at their recent reunion at Chorwad on Dhirubhai’s 80th birth anniversary, the biggest lesson they learnt from their father was that if you take up some work, take it up with a mission and don’t leave it half way! ”The struggle should not be to crawl up to a position that is above average, but to do the best one can by oneself and by others. The fight is not to leave others behind, but to achieve one’s own full potential.
The crime is not being perceived as below average or just average, but to know that you are capable of much more and yet not reaching out for it! After all what meaning does below or above average hold if the ‘average’ was to be pulled up several notches? What happens if ALL are extraordinary? Then the average person becomes extraordinary, and wouldn’t that be your goal too? Strive for the extraordinary within yourself and if you achieve that, you would automatically be far above average -- an extraordinary human being, without even having thought about it!
Consider this gem I stumbled upon -- “When I walk through what scares me, I am walking through what is stopping me from getting or going where I want to be..." When I asked my facebook friends their worst fears, here is what they confessed to fearing most -- mediocrity, complacency, not being able to break one’s comfort zone, not making a name before dying, not meeting expectations, failure or ignominy. Says one, “There is nothing attractive or desirable about being average..” Another agrees, “Being mediocre is so bland and so average. ”Most of the time what holds us down is being caught up so badly in our fears that we refuse to step outside our comfort zone and actually get down to the task of living life as it is meant to be lived! The pragmatic and wildly popular American singer-musician-actor Taylor Swift said, "I'm intimidated by the fear of being average." I would say that the problem is not the fear, because the fear is what helps you push yourself to standing full stature. The problem is the intimidation -- being so bogged down by that fear that you do nothing about it!
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