Over breakfast this morning, I was chatting to one or two of the travellers at the guest house, and looking around at others. Suddenly I had the feeling that we were an eclectic mix of oddballs.
My first thought from that realisation was that this guest house, in this place – Auroville – must attract unusual people. There may be a little truth in that. However, a deeper truth then emerged: we are all neurodivergent. And by all, I mean everyone on the planet, including you and me.
Normal does not actually exist. If our minds had only one dimension, then it might be meaningful to line us all up in order and find the person nearest the middle, or in the midst of the densest crowd, in that ordering. However, a human brain has at least a hundred trillion dimensions to it. And that is just the brain. Our mind is much more than that. In such an unfathomably vast space, each of our minds is a star in the universe. Perhaps some are clustered a little closer together, like galaxies. And yet look how far the sun is from our nearest neighbour in the Milky Way.
There is no normal human mind. Each of us is unique. And we are incomparable. Perhaps we should lessen how much we require others to be the same as us. And more importantly, perhaps we should lessen how much we require ourself to be like others. Instead of coercing oneself to fit in, perhaps we could accept that we are different to others, and others are different to us. Perhaps we could accept that we are all neurodivergent.
And more than just accepting this diversity, perhaps we could rejoice in it.
