Freak accidents are, by definition, rare. They seldom occur and are often unflappable, both by their unpredictable nature and by their inability to be circumvented. Fearing the unexpected, thus fearing the indefinable, can and will cause great stress on the very ordinary nature of life. Hence, the anomalous should remain unexpected.
Yet, we thrive on the surprise and misfortune of others, like blood to a nightwalker; we are hungry for constant parades of the anomalous: the more extreme, the more we enjoy the effervescent sting of emotion that accompanies it. Day in and day out we are bombarded with only the largest aberrations that survive in the food chain of news stories. With 7 billion random organisms running around, not to mention their relative species numbering in the trillions, there is no shortage of anomalies, ironic as that may seem.
So what of this inundation of accreting fancies that exists in perpetuity? How, you ask, does this affect me?
I give you the fox in the yard:
“There’s a fox in my yard,” my sister said, clinging tightly to her baby. “Don’t let anyone near it. You must use caution.”
A child in England, an ocean away from our North Jersey backyard, had his finger bit off by a stray fox. Ouch. No more admiring the fox… we must remain behind the window.
When the unexpected is expected, fear is protracted into eternity. What was once just a fox will forever now be a danger. No mention of the millions of foxes worldwide who have never harmed a soul, or the thousands of people who hold them as pets. No! Foxes are dangerous now.
What of the expected? In this feverish frenzy of freak affairs, where do the normal things go? What is our perspective on the expected if we are so keen on the unexpected?
Did you hear the story of the Fox who ate the piece of bread that I gave to him? I didn’t think so… boring.
What is not anomalous is now tediously insipid. We live with the constant need for stupefaction, manic for another taste to keep us moving. And yet, like all drugs, the pill is not sufficient. Our disappointment at the ordinary is not satiated by the extraordinary, albeit for a brief moment of solace that sends us deeper into our own deprecation.
I am not interesting enough.
So what’s the answer?
Somehow, it is the ordinary that ultimately astounds us. No anomaly, great or small, can fill in the gaps left by our quotidian existence.
To stop chasing is to start healing and ultimately enjoy the fundamentally un-anomalous chaos that is life.
