Yesterday I was watching the episode of Twin Peaks where Donna meets a young man who never leaves his home. He also grows orchids. Admittedly, I was partly intrigued by that because he never has to go outside, but that wasn’t the only thing.
Eccentric people know more about themselves than the rest of us do. If we stayed home all day, do we know what we would do? I doubt most of us would do anything useful like grow orchids. I would finish watching Twin Peaks.
It takes so much courage to fly in the face of convention and live exactly in the way your individual personality needs. We grow up believing there is one set path in life. It has a few variations, but essentially, they’re all the same. We go to college, get a job, get married, and have children. Why do we all do the same thing, expecting it to make all of us happy, when we are so different from each other?
It’s not even designed to make the majority happy. Only 13% of people are happy with their jobs (and I suspect this is because they have different jobs from the rest of us) and almost half of all marriages end in divorce. It’s almost like this formula was never intended to give us a good life.
There is not one person in the world who is not in some way eccentric, but there are many who do not honor it. What would happen if we truly got to know ourselves? Maybe this is why we are all so lost. We keep searching for happiness without even knowing what we’re looking for.
It starts with the small things. Eccentricity is really just gracious living, but tailored to the individual. Maybe it’s just the courage to repeat what you enjoy everyday with almost neurotic consistency. If we like one type of clothing, why do we ever have to wear anything else? If we are naturally quiet, why do we need to make ourselves talk? Why do we sleep in beds when we could sleep in hammocks?
We’re so disconnected from our personalities that we don’t even know what we would do with this freedom if we gave it to ourselves. My homework assignment for myself this weekend is figuring it out. I think it starts with buying one of these:
Half-Blood Kuwaiti 