Exceptional

Someone once told me that I was, "An exceptional young man." I have to agree.

What exceptional means, is the exception to the regular. An exceptional phone would be one that explodes and burns the hand of the person trying to use it. Very few of them do that.

An exceptional sheep might be one born without the ability to grow wool. There aren't many of those sorts of sheep. They all froze to death before they could breed. Highly exceptional.

An exceptional lawyer would be one that never wins a case, ever, in his or her career. That's very rare.

An exceptional space-flight might include three of the four crew going insane and jumping out of the ship, where they asphyxiate and explode in the vacuum of space. Not many space-flights end like that.

The problem with words like, "Exceptional", "incredible", "phenomenal" and "extraordinary" is that they aren't specific enough.

There are plenty of things about me that are exceptional, just nothing that makes me exceptionally good.

This brings to another point I want to make. Despite my former statement, I often say, and I say it now, that I am a pretty normal bloke. But most people, when I say this, respond with, "Nobody is normal!".

There is such a thing as normal. It's just relative. And for those of you who will now say, "Well, if normal is relative, it's valueless".

NO. Just because something is dependent on its environment does not mean it isn't THERE. Time is also relative. And time definitely exists.

Here's an example of the relativity of normal:

There is a room filled with people. They're all women over the age of sixty.

In addition to all these women, there is one teenage boy.

In this room he is, for the purposes of the statement, the least normal.

But then, suddenly, a grey little alien appears.

Now, by compare, the boy is very very normal. Much more normal in this group to the other humans.

I am normal. Put me in a room of old ladies, and I'm not so much. But compared to everyone I know, and everyone in the world, I am very normal.

No one is exactly alike to anyone else, so yeah, one could make an argument that 'No one is normal'. But uniqueness does not guarantee anything other than itself. It doesn't make it good, nice, useful, worthwhile or any other adjective you can think of.

There are now seven billion human beings on this earth. Are you really so arrogant to believe that there is anything you can naturally do that someone else cannot do better, that you have some special unrepeatable quality? Dedicate your life to something, sure, you've got a chance to be better than anyone else. But as you are? Nope. Humans aren't beautiful unique snowflakes, anymore than snowflakes are anything other than a whole lot of white crap when you mush them together. We are common, and for every child born, you are becoming just that little bit more common.

You can disagree, or argue that you and you alone are without a true equal. But I can tell you right now, someone else reading this probably thinks the exact same thing.