How my hobbit parents taught me to not be average
I mention my little hobbit parents (all are dead for a long time) a lot. Mostly, this is because I am only now realizing how cool they were.
This is not just because they were great dancers and charismatic and adorable. This is not because they were amazingly huggable to everyone. Though they were. Strangers would hug my parents—often randomly.
They were cool because they were absolutely unafraid about certain things:
Talking to strangers
Listening to strangers
Doing “boring” things.
TALKING TO STRANGERS
My dad never met a person—even a president—that he didn’t try to get to understand. And he never just asked people how the weather was or what they did for a living or how they were.
He’d do that, but then he’d dive right into the big questions, the deep questions. He was a lovely kind man who had no faith in his own intellect because he dropped out of school at a young age because of his dyslexia. I always grew up thinking it was fourth grade. Someone else told me it was second. It was early.
So, the way he learned was from talking and listening to other people (and also documentaries and PBS and the History Channel, those sorts of things) and doing that talking and listening in a way that was active and always ready to learn.
He was a mechanic and a truck driver and could care less about how much money someone had (ultra-rich or ultra-poor) or their other demographics, he cared about them. Never intimidated, he talked.
My mom talked to strangers because she wanted to know people’s stories, to put the puzzles of lives together.
Here’s the thing: Both my parents were curious about the world beyond them, about people who had different thoughts about living, about religion, about politics, about what success meant, about what kindness meant, about what family meant.
That made them cool.
LISTENING TO STRANGERS
It’s pretty obvious from what I wrote up there, but to my parents listening was just as important as talking. That’s uncomfortable sometimes, right?
Here’s the thing here: We usually learn the most when we let ourselves be uncomfortable.
I was the youngest kid by a lot. My dad was the youngest, too. And if he was alive today, he’d be almost 100. He did a lot of learning and growing and being uncomfortable when he listened.
But he never let that get in his way. He’d take those conversations and think on them and then he did something kind of amazing.
He’d grow.
He’d learn.
His ideas and way he interacted with the world? They evolved.
BEING NORMAL IS NOT BEING ALIVE
One of the ways my dad evolved was this: he learned that being normal (and trying to be normal) is pretty limiting.
Trying to fit in?
Same way.
“You don’t ever want to be normal, Carrie,” he’d say. “It’s dull.”
My mom? Same thing.
When I would get tormented for my Snoopy shoes or the way my voice sounds like a Muppet, and lament how I wanted to fit in?
“Fitting in? Pfft.” She was very good at dismissive noises. “That’s dull. You don’t want to be dull. It’s so boring.”
Even the way my parents approached strangers wasn’t normal. They didn’t stop at asking about the weather or asking how they are doing. They waited. They were open. They asked questions to understand the big puzzles of life, of people and of community and of existence—and sometimes the big questions about just where to find the yeast in the grocery store.
And tofu. My mom always had a hard time trying to find the tofu I asked her to get. Actually, that may have been on purpose.
WHAT YOU CAN CHOOSE
Being normal, being average, means not taking chances when you talk to people.
Being normal, being average, means not taking chances with yourself.
And that’s okay.
You get to choose what and who and how you want to be, just remember to take the time to make that choice.
How often do you ask yourself about your why? About your purpose? About what drives you to make the choices you do? How often do you ask yourself if you want to be average or something else? About what motivates you to action? About what motivates you to love? About what motivates you to awe? Or to gratitude?
When we go into the experiences of strangers (via books, essays, blog posts, conversations), we learn things that we might not be figuring out on our own (or through the social media algorithm that keeps sending us puppy videos.
Channel my sweet, hobbity parents and reach out to someone every day—every other day if you’re an introvert—and see what happens, okay?
Oh! And try to get enough water and some good sleep. :)
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