What’s your relationship with the word “extraordinary”?
Whenever I’m feeling healthy and whole and fully sovereign in myself I would tell you that I wish to live an “extraordinary” life.
Even in the midst of this terrible disrupted year when all we seem to have is the at-home routine, I believe I have still sought - and experienced - the extraordinary.
Does that sound like some kind of crazy humble brag? Let me tell you the story of what it took to embody and compassionately redefine the word and make “the extraordinary” into something that belongs in the everyday.
Expanding the Extraordinary In these Extra/Ordinary Times
When you look up “extraordinary” with our friends at Merriam Webster, they offer “going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary.”
This definition seems to explain a Valentine’s Day trip to Paris, graduating summa cum laude from an Ivy League school, or having quintuplets. It also can include pulling over the car to take in a particularly stunning sunset, leaving a love note in your beloved’s pocket on an average Tuesday, or taking time to ask neighbors if they need anything from the store when you make a run into town.
With this expanded definition, there are a hundred opportunities a day to go beyond the typical, even in an era when most of life is lived with a few miles of home.
At this moment, I’m deeply grateful I’ve landed at an understanding of extraordinary that is at once more expansive and terrifically small. If I had been striving for an extraordinary life when I was twenty-one in the midst of Covid circumstances, I would have given up long ago.
“Someday, we’re going to be extraordinary.”
In the spring of 2001, my college roommate directed Wendy Wasserstein’s play Uncommon Women and Others. The show was brilliant. To watch it in my last few weeks as an undergrad, full of all the fears of what the “real world” would bring was ridiculously (and understandably) emotional.
And, as we tend to do when absorbing good art (especially while ridiculously emotional), I pulled the show through my own prism and refracted it so it spoke directly to me.
I can still see the blond pixie girl put her arm around another actor at the end of the final act and proclaim “someday, we will be extraordinary!”
At twenty-one when the world was still wrapped in its pre-9/11 blanket, the greater part of me was all full of hope. We all had our entire rich, as-yet-to-be-written lives ahead of us. I was all about committing to this horizon reach to the extraordinary.
A hard-to-ignore part of me was also full of regret (and also the bagels and beer that had a gluten-intolerant me feeling bloody awful most of the time). Though I’d spent most of high school on the stage, I’d said goodbye to performing just as I’d said goodbye to writing fiction when I entered college. I had resigned myself to reading and commenting on other people’s words, watching other people’s plays, longing after other women’s boyfriends, and feeling generally uncomfortable in my own skin.
I had achieved so much in my four years, but I was still assigning the real goal, the extraordinary self who lived a life of passion and creativity, to that blessed someday.
The Long Dance With the (Extra)Ordinary
I held on to this line for most of the next two decades, constantly measuring whether I had achieved the almighty “extraordinary.”
In 2008 I wrote a blog post about my quest for the “extraordinary” how I finally made some peace with that. (Eating like a grown up and no longer longing for a lover surely helped all that.)
And yet, it was still a “middle of the journey” moment. When I wrote that post at age 28, I joked about how I would be happy with myself even if I did not have my name on the spine of a book by the time I was 30. (The subtext, of course, was that I was kidding/not kidding. Without that wunderkind book on the shelf, I could be happy, but I was also aware I was not quite living up to extraordinary.)
Due to New Information, the Author Has Compelled to Alter the Story
When I started researching that book of mine that would come out earlier in 2020, right smack in the middle of my fortieth year, I finally got my hands on Wasserman’s play. The part I mis-remembered for all those years is in the very last line. Rita speaks:
Timmy says when I get my head together, and if he gets the stocks, I’ll be able to do a little writing. I think if I make it to forty I can be pretty amazing. Holly, when we’re forty we can be pretty amazing. You too Muffy and Samantha, when we’re… forty-five we can be pretty fucking amazing.
Wait, what? I had spent all this time forcing myself to be extraordinary when all I had to do was be amazing?
And I hadn’t even remembered what would make the characters so amazing (or extraordinary): all they had to do was write. And make it to forty.
Turns out, I nailed it. I even have four more years to land at the ultimate “pretty fucking amazing.”
And you know what that is? Extraordinary.
Extraordinary, Amazing, Magical, Sovereign, and the Power to Re-Define and Embody Those Words As We Go
Here we are in an extraordinary year that is anything but amazing (most of the time). In spite of it all, we are constantly surrounded by chances to stand sovereign in our own choices and to call in our own kind of magic when the usual ways of the world are inaccessible.
We’re called redefine the words and rewrite the story and re-member all the pieces of life in a new way.
If I could go back and speak to my 21 year-old self about what a beautiful life might look like, I would leave extraordinary and amazing out of the conversation. Though I have come to love those words as I have lived them and re-defined them, there’s too much room for misinterpretation (and perfectionism and discontent).
Instead, I would tell me to go for magical and sovereign and trust all the rest to fall into place.
What is magic?
Magic is having the power to seek and see wonder in the everyday.
Magic is the ability to find hope in the shadows.
Magic is realizing you've had the power to transform your world all along.
And what is sovereignty?
To be sovereign in your own life is to have your feet lovingly rooted into the earth and your hair all spangled with stars as you love what is and reach for what is possible.
To be sovereign is to know yourself and trust yourself in the midst of the ordinary and the extraordinary.
To be sovereign is to know how to use your magic for your own highest good and for the good of all creation.
This December I have two ways for you to bring more Sovereignty and Magic into your life and redefine the way you use the words that shape your experience.
The #7MagicWords Challenge is our seasonal creativity project. This free week of prompts, community, and, of course, creative magic gives you a chance to play with and redefine the worlds that define your world.
A Sovereign Way 2021 is a half-day planning retreat for creative entrepreneurs and sovereign souls who want to envision and plan a year of personal and collective transformation.
