Anomalizing

I feel I jump to anomalizing things. OK — I made that word up. But to make sense of this world, I put things that happen to me into different buckets. Lessons, mistakes, good/bad memories, anomalies, etc. Sometimes I feel that my anomaly bucket is pretty large. As if by some swing of nature’s wand, I seem to have developed a proclivity for finding myself in the weirdest situations.

I wonder if I put too many things into this bucket. Whether this proclivity is one of my mind. I tend to think in extremes. The bad — be-witchingly so. The good — magnificently so. And what this does is that it magnifies in my head small quirks and mishaps of daily life to coveted anomalies. I wonder if all of us close our worlds like that. Quickly rejecting people and acts and experiences that we cannot rationalize. Instead seeking a higher ground by shunning these acts into the arbitrary realm of anomalies.

I feel I need to tell my stories not from a place where I look at them as anomalies but from a place of balanced understanding. Sometimes I package events into snippets of oddities and expect my kind listeners to shake their heads in shocked disbelief. It stems from how I reject the context of situations and cling to small bits of it that seem to tip-toe outside my lines of normality.

I believe if I achieve not thinking in this way, I will broaden my horizons to a wider array of people and experiences. I think it is a task demanding in both patience and empathy. Eventually, I hope my bucket of anomalies will serve its true function. Holding rare occurrences of experiences that lie squarely outside the ever expanding realms of what I would like to believe of this world. Events that I learn to not look with contempt and always with a chance of reconsideration. Events that I afford more chances to be reinstated into the world of acknowledgement, alternatives and understanding.