“The Outsider” What does that expression throw up for you? If you are an outsider in any sense, then you will respond to it in ways that I never can, because I am not one.
I am not an outsider. I am not a foreigner in the land I call home. I am not exceptional, or different, or disadvantaged. I am not exceptional, or special, or more-than-averagely privileged. I am ordinary. Unremarkable.
I am not an ‘outsider’, but nor am I an ‘insider’. I have no special access to people or information or ways of being.
I am your common or garden variety of human being, doing the best I can to get by.
When I hear the words “The Outsider” – I hear them in Ian Hunter’s voice, from his song of the same name on the album You’re never alone with a schizophrenic (have to wonder if that title would get past the sensitivity readers today) – and I also go back to reading L’Étranger as a pretentious teenager who thought that going to university would change her life in ways that it never did.
I’ve done a quick trawl of the net and don’t know if Hunter was inspired by Camus, but he’s well-read-enough to have been so, so I’ll take the linkage as read. It’s been a long time since I read Camus. A long time since I stood on a floor and danced to Hunter playing live. Even the vinyl doesn’t come out as often as it used to. I am not that teenager anymore.
But I do still read the old books; I do still listen to the old songs; I still have the romantic dreams. But, for me at least, none of it is real. I am ordinary. Not outside, not inside, not different enough in any way to be interesting.
So, then, what do I do about that?
More importantly, what if I don’t want to do anything about it? What if I am happy with it? What then?
Then…I turn the advice on its head. If the prompt I am given is to write my ‘otherness’, then let me subvert that and write my ‘sameness’.
I trawled back to when I first started posting my thoughts about myself and the world in general and it turns out that my third post was entitled “Embrace your ordinary.” That was almost enough to stop me in my tracks and abandon this piece, on the grounds that I’ve already said this stuff.
But then I figured that would have meant abandoning the message…the message that being ordinary is also ok, more than ok, a good place to start, a good place to be, a good place to go, to end, to stay. Being ordinary is a good place to choose if it is what speaks to your soul.
It’s not even a bad place to be if it is what the world thrusts upon you. You can still choose to embrace it.
Breaking News: the world still needs ordinary people.
It needs parents, teachers, farmers, factory workers, bus drivers, road-sweepers, waiters, bar-tenders, IT-fixers, office-gophers, mailmen, data-crunchers. It needs counsellors and coaches and nurses and candy-stripers. It needs bakers and cooks and school dinner-ladies and crossing patrols. It needs mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and cousins and friends. The world needs hedge-cutters and sign-erectors and window cleaners. It needs people who raise seedlings and give them out as starter plants to neighbours. It needs refuse collectors and beach cleaners and entertainers whose only job is to make us laugh against our will. It needs those guys who run across motorways in the middle of the night to lay the cones to close off the bit of road they’re going to work on tomorrow, or the next day, or sometime soon, we assume, because they’ve closed off the lane and must be going to do something with it.
It needs the guys who lay the tarmac. It needs the women who hold the hands of the sorrowing. It needs the children who run around like idiots and remind us how that felt.
The world needs all the sportsmen and -women who never make the Olympic teams. It needs all the football-crazy kids who never get further than shouting from the sidelines. It needs referees and umpires and ball-boys and -girls. It needs the people who sing in pubs. All the bakers who sell at village fetes. It probably also needs the poachers who steal the odd salmon for their table. It definitely needs the travellers and the stay-at-homers.
The world needs poets and writers and story-tellers – and it doesn’t matter if we are outsiders or insiders or in-betweeners or just ordinary folk who think we don’t have a story to tell. We should tell that: the non-story of who we are. Because that matters too.
So, here I am, instead of walking away from embracing ordinary, I'm repeating it, I'm reinforcing it.
Yes, if you are an outsider, in any sense of that word, even if only in a non-identifiable sense that you feel yourself to be ‘outside’, then write that, live that, stand up and shout about that!
And by the same token if you’re not…then that’s where we start. You and me. The not-special, not-different, not-outside/not-inside ones. The ordinary ones. We write that, live that, stand up and shout (or at least whisper) about that. It still has its place.
That previous piece of mine was written in August 2017 – an improbable eight years ago. Improbable because I find it hard to believe that I have been doing this for close on a decade. Yet here I am. An ordinary person, with nothing much to say, still saying it!
My ordinary has changed since 2017.
I have left the corporate world behind entirely.
I have abandoned previous notions and definitions of ‘success’ or ‘achievement’ – not deriding them – just acknowledging they served me then, they do not do so now.
I have lost a soul-mate from this plane of existence.
I have found another who has made me redefine the whole nature of soul-mated-ness. It doesn't always have anything to do with romantic or sexual relationships. The 'significance of' and 'connection to' others is both wider and deeper than that, if we let it be.
I have quit work, moved house, created and recreated and abandoned to its own devices a patch I choose to call a garden.
I have deepened old friendships and found new ones.
I have redefined my own ‘ordinary’ day-to-day existence around physical exercise, spiritual enquiry, writerly adventures.
And yet…when I go back to that old piece…there are things that are still true...
Reading. Writing. Journalling. Walking. Taking my camera out to play. Watching TV. Having conversations. Enjoying – absolutely relishing and savouring – the space that is my home. The tangible links, through books, furniture, soft furnishings, clothes, photographs, to the ancestors – mine & Clive’s, because this was his home long before it was mine. Cut flowers, growing plants. Snippetting the wisdom from magazines. Cooking. Taking time to just sit…and look…and listen…catch the scents….tastes…just be.
I am not special. I am not different. I am as ordinary as they come.
But at the same time, I realise, I am the only ‘me’ that there will ever be. And perhaps that is why I think it is worth writing down my personal take on…well…just about anything really.
Even if this is the only piece you ever read…thank you for doing so. And now go out there and embrace your own ordinary or extraordinary or outsiderly or insiderly or whateverness – and maybe think about sharing that with the rest of us. Whoever you are, whatever you are…the world needs that too.
