Ordinary
Sean Moore
What do you think about when the working day is over? What courses through your head when you come home? Are you numbed, are you spent, are you tuned out, turned off?
No, not you, because you are not ordinary.
No, when the night swallows up the day, it is your buzzing brain that keeps the light on. The ordinaries go home to their televisions and their microwave dinners and their unsatisfactory relationships and their too-large apartments and their inadequate collections of art and unimpressive love-lifes and their unfulfilling hobbies and their discarded diets and their six packs of beer and their poorly adhered-to exercise plans and their beds that give them back problems.But not you.
No, not you, because you are not ordinary.
You dream about the future. You think about how the world is going to change. You think about the way the world is changing. And you think about how you'll fit into all of it. How you won't just go along for the ride. How you'll be in the driver's seat. How you'll be the change in the world. Wonder why anyone would want anything less. And you'll know how Alexander felt, how Rommel, how Patton, how Agamemnon, how Hannibal, how Xerxes felt. The whole world before them, ready to be conquered.
No, not you, because you are not ordinary.
So I wonder - What do you think about when there is no more "work" to be done, when the job has been confined to the closed door of the office, or underneath the lid of a laptop. Are you content to let your mind lie fallow?
Or can you not turn it off? Is it not satisfying to go home and enjoy the few hours of leisure before heading to bed and starting the whole thing over tomorrow? Is it not enough to put in a honest eight hours of work at a job you like working on projects you enjoy? Aren't you content to be successful at your job, to be respected by your peers, to be seen by your friends, to be loved by your family?
No, not you, because you are not ordinary.
You wish you could turn it off, but it's no use. So instead you begin to build an empire in your mind. Oh the problems you conquer. Oh the armies of solutions you command. Oh the wars you have fought to convince yourself that you are normal, that you are content, that you are ordinary. After all, everything around you tells you that this should be enough. But there is no satisfaction in it. There is no glory in retreat. So instead you press on, you throw yourself into the dreams you've held onto for so long in your head. You fight for them to be real.
Perhaps instead you feel like Horatius, the only man on the bridge, the only man against the hordes. Would you turn and flee?
No, not you.
Because you are not ordinary.
Just like everyone else.