Ebele Mogo: The World needs more Ordinary People [OPINION]

I think so and I could be wrong. It is nice to be able to look up to your favourite celebrity after all. However, it seems to get truer and truer for me- that I value ordinariness over extraordinariness. Ordinariness prompts a sort of healthy simplicity- before words and making meaning, before titles, before the need to arrange it all into something lovely.

I see as much (maybe even more) to admire in the ordinariness of someone as I do in their accolades. I see so much that makes me confront my own self. I see that my joy is bigger than me- it holds hands with the passions and joys of someone else in some other place.  I see that my pain has its kin in some random person. I am relieved to see that my obsessions might be strange but not entirely unique.

Ordinary people break and twist and bend. Ordinary people change. Ordinary people push hard and aim high but their persistent stringing together of half-bold half-scared moments comprises their prayer beads, their hope, their certainty. Ordinary people have depressing days.  Ordinary people have amazing days. Ordinary people are walking contradictions. Ordinary people sometimes think they are extremely different, they just don’t know the truth- that everyone is ordinary like them.

Ordinary people will keep us alive. They will draw one side of the curtain to the left, the other to the right and help us see that they too have been there. They will be the clear water in which we see ourselves reflected. We will touch our faces. We will feel ourselves. We will breathe, feel animated again, and keep on living.

Sometimes I think that life is too short to know all the answers to the questions that I ask in all my deepest places. I want to be like the extraordinary people who seem to know. Sometimes I wonder the shape that my longing and questions and passion will take and then I look at extraordinary people and think- wouldn’t it be nice for it to all fall together nicely like theirs seems to have? I forget that close up, they too are ordinary like me.

But I think I get it for the most part. There is already too much noise keeping people safe but isolated, keeping people thinking that their pain is so unique and unbearable and driving them in crazy directions. I see how an ordinary person can save their lives.

I see how being ordinary might help us meet each other in the most surprising places. If we were ordinary I suspect there will be spaces for others to enter in and exhale. If we were ordinary I suspect our ordinariness would automatically be the hand that motions to another- hey climb up, you’ve got it in you too.

More and more, I think I get the reason why stringing ordinary imperfect words together matters. It is the same reason why the world needs more ordinary people- they resuscitate us all.