On the weirdness of it all…

Hi, how’s your day going? Has it been, for want of a better word, weird?

I’m going to presume it has – because, if you really start digging, everything is weird. I guess I’ve thought this, on and off, forever, but it was brought to the front of my mind when I was reading Raptitude, a new blog a friend sent to me. It’s subtitle is “Getting better at being human” and, broadly speaking, it’s about what it’s like to be alive. Not religious, not political, just about how it is to exist.

And it’s not boring! I particularly liked writing like: 

So pause, and at least remember how cool it is that you were able to sit all the way here. Your ancestors would have been too humble to even joke about a chair that hurtles across cities. You sat all the way here. Good for you, for living in such a time. If you do nothing else right today, at least you sat at fifty miles an hour.

It’s about mindfulness, and it makes its point in a (to me) well-phrased way. Also, it’s funny, which gets always gets extra marks.

But as the blog’s author (David Cain) shows in a different article, everything we do is remarkable, is notable, is strange (his word), is weird (my word).

Language is weird – we make sounds or we make small marks on paper (or on a screen) and they convey meaning to other people. We can communicate our thoughts, ideas about a future that doesn’t exist, a past that we have only heard about from others. We can create stories about things that never happened. And we learn how to do this without really trying. How does that work?

Our bodies are weird. Or even more weird than you think. Consider how breathing works. Or eating. How all the muscles in our legs work together to allow us to stand and to walk. Isn’t that amazing?

And, a personal obsession: record players? Magic…pure inexplicable magic. A needle scratches bumps on a plastic disc and a whole orchestra plays from the speakers! No science can explain that kind of witchcraft (well, obviously it can, but never so a luddite like me could understand it).

Everything is amazing, when I stop to consider it. And Cain’s blog helped to remind me of that. So, thanks to him. And if you’re in the mood for some gentle meditative contemplation, head over there yourself. He has wisdom to share, but don’t worry; there’s jokes too.