Try to live a singular life!

I was in class last night at NKU but had an appointment on campus before class, so I was there about two hours before my class started. My appointment only lasted about five minutes of course, so I was left with almost two full hours to waste on campus . . . in the rain.

I wasn't particularly annoyed by this though because our classroom is always empty for hours before our class starts and I knew I could just wait there for a bit and read next week's assignment. The downside to this is the lack of any real windows in the room, which sucks. There are windows there but they are only a crappy horizontal row of windows over seven feet up the wall at the back of the class. It's almost as if they were placed there only begrudgingly as an afterthought just to let some meagre amount of natural light in.

After I had been sitting there in the fluorescent bath for twenty or thirty minutes, I thought I could hear the rain pick up outside and really start to pour, so I stood up on my desk seat to look out the windows onto the plaza below. It was pouring! Pouring! And I was on the third floor, so I was in a really good position to see people waiting at the doors of other buildings for the rain to slack off some.

And then there was this girl. We weren't more than twenty yards apart so I could see her very well. She was very close to the building I was in and walking across the plaza very slowly really with a hoodie on, but the hood was thrown back. She was quite soaked and didn't particularly look very happy to be out in the rain. She nearly walked into a very large puddle but stopped at the last second and stood still at its edge. I could see from my angle that the puddle was only a couple of inches deep at most, but was several feet in diameter and at the edge of it she just stood there, looking down at it. For several seconds in the rain.

And then she did the most amazing thing. She started dancing. In what seemed to me an almost complete unselfconsciousness, she did a little series of tap steps across the puddle, sending up little silver splashes of water out around herself and then, just as quickly as she had started, she stepped out from the little puddle and continued on her way, smiling as she went.

I'm reasonably certain that I was the only person who saw this happen and I have to wonder if she'd have puddle danced if she had known I was there, but what a delicious sense of freedom she must have felt for just a few moments. Maybe a feeling of singularity and uniqueness, that in all the world at the moment, for just those few seconds, she was dancing and everyone else was not.

I know that its a common truism that "everyone is unique" but there is a far cry between having your own combination of interests and personality that makes you "unique" and doing something that makes you singular.

For a time when I worked at the bookstore, Julie would drop me off at work every afternoon and then I would get a ride at night to a White Castle that was close to the interstate where Julie would pick me up about 11-ish, two hours after the book store had closed. Many nights as I sat there at a window watching the snow fall and reading (Crime and Punishment and Ulysses are two books I remember reading there) I was really struck by the singularness of my activity. There's a really amazing feeling you get when you realize that no one else anywhere could be doing what you're doing right then, at that second.

Here's the deal. As brutal as it is to hear this, you're aren't unique. Not really. And neither am I. 99% of the things you do in your life everyone else is doing too. The details might vary wildy, but in the broadstrokes your life is mostly like everyone else's. It's just a sad fact determined. We're just not that different.

But that's what makes singular moments so special because most people most of the time AREN'T breaking the routine and so, if you do something outside the norm for yourself it's probably outside the norm for a LOT of other people too. So, I encourage you all to be odd and maybe not necessarily make it a secret. Read Ulysses at 11 o'clock on a snowy night in the dining room of a White Castle and hold your book up for everyone to see it or tap dance in a puddle on a rainy afternoon, because those are what inspire others to do so too. And relish the fact that just for (if nothing else) one moment in your life, you did something that no one else was doing, no matter how trivial that one thing was. THAT is a singular moment and it's beautiful and full of grace.