Your Normal Is Someone Else’s Amazing.

Have you ever thought about how amazing someone else is at a particular skill, or ability? What seems completely normal to them is amazing to us.

Well same goes for you and I. There are aspects of us that are normal to us but amazing to someone else. For example, your fitness level, as good as it is, may be normal to you but amazing to someone else.

Someone else’s capacity to make lots of money is their normal and amazing to someone else. You get the drift.

Having an awareness of this, creates within us a reminder to be grateful for what we seem to be good at. Just the other day I was running with a friend of mine, what we would call a casual 10km run. We ran past another runner who seemed to be working really hard. I mean they were puffing pretty intensely. My running buddy commented saying, do you remember those days when that was us!

Instantly I realised and remembered how far we had come in our everyday fitness. In our world to say that on Sunday you are running 20km is like saying ‘I’m popping to the shops to get some milk!’ So to us it is normal and to a non -runner that is incomprehensible let alone amazing.

‘That’s great Joe, good for you, buy I don’t relate! Everything normal in my life is somebody else’s normal too!’ Well…that is simply not true. There are a couple of things here:

1. There is something that you can do, that with application and commitment you can do better than 90% of the population.
2. How do I find this out? By exploring, being curious and trying different experiences. Open your mind to new found possibilities.

It took me until my mid 30s for me to discover something, that with application and commitment I may become good at. Through my intense interest in personal and spiritual development, I found myself becoming increasingly passionate about sharing anything I learnt with others. My life transformed from getting a job and staying in a job to making a job and get damn good at it.

If it’s true that your normal may be somebody else’s amazing, then the opposite is true as well.

That is, what’s normal to you or me may be somebody else’s hell. This may sound real dark but not necessarily so. For example, I make my living by speaking to groups of people. This has become my normal, but to a couple of my friends that is hell!! I can understand that. As, a couple of my friends work 60 plus hour weeks, doing something they love, that is their normal but my hell.

As much as I love what I do, I am not interested in doing it that intensely on a weekly basis.

All the above can also be true if you or I have settled for that nagging pain in our back….and after a while we just put up with it, and it becomes a lower level of normal and somebody who has not experienced that pain, the thought of what is being put up with is hell.

So what is the point to all this chatter about what is normal to you is somebody else’s amazing or hell ? I am hoping that is insight expands your horizon of awareness. Awareness of becoming increasingly grateful for your version of normal health, which to someone else is amazing.

Awareness that, perhaps a certain relationship which has slowly diminished to a very low standard is somebody else’s hell. This then becomes a form of waking up to that fact, that that is not normal in a very clear way.

Awareness that there IS something in you that with application and commitment can become your normal and somebody else’s amazing. 

Personally, this thinking has given me clarity on how to deepen my sense of gratitude and profound appreciation for my health and vitality. Currently at 50 years of age, I am pain free, disease free and can run and run well. It is easy to compare myself to other 50 plus year old runners who are faster and fitter than me and think that my normal would be their hell! I could focus on that. 

But it wasn’t until I hear from most of my close friends in and around the same age, they are in some kind of continual pain, or their body weight has spiralled out of control, or they are on some kind of medication. Truly when I just recently became aware of all this I was shocked. 

I had assumed that my normal was their normal, but in fact my normal is their amazing. By the same token I have a friend who has this incredible capacity to deeply connect with anyone in a heart- beat. He sees everyone with love, no matter how annoying strange or nasty. This is normal to him, to me that is amazing. 

What is your normal that is somebody else’s amazing? What is your normal that can become somebody else’s amazing?