“I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me”*

There is wisdom that allows everyone to bring their remarkable contribution.  Too often, however, something gets in the way, like when we compare ourselves with others, or others compare us with someone else.  Why do we have to be like someone else to have anything valuable to bring?

Richard Bachman’s novels weren’t as good as Stephen King’s in the eyes of those selling and buying books – the trouble was that Bachman was King.  It turned out to be the name people were purchasing; King was writing under a pseudonym so he could break out of the culture at the time of only being able to publish one book a year.**

On my favourite Saturday morning radio show, the presenter Danny Baker was asking his listeners if they’d ever been at the front of a queue, and how did they get there?  One of the stories that came in was of a family who’d drive down through the night from Aberdeen to Dover, to be the first in the queue for the ferry.  One year they managed it, only for the ferry to dock poorly so another queue was let on first.  Getting to the front of a queue is a random thing.  All the people at the front of their respective queues got there way more randomly than they know.

I wonder whether we place ourselves better in the universe if we accept randomness, searching for the remarkable everywhere.  How the person who’s number one may not the best, and that kind of thing.

When we see how everyone can bring something special, we open ourselves to possibility, then the world can only be a richer place.

(*Dawna Markova, quote in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer for the 18/5/16.)
(**This story is told in Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)