By admin 
Do you ever look around and wonder:
Why can’t people just be normal?
Drive normally. Talk normally. Behave normally. Not having a loud phone conversation underneath someone’s bedroom window at two in the morning.
Just… normal.
I have this thought more often than I care to admit.
And then I remembered Portia Nelson’s wonderful Autobiography in Five Short Chapters.
With this autobiography she shows us a pattern , a way of thinking and reacting.
This pattern is
1) I keep walking down the same street,
2) I keep falling into the same hole,
3) I slowly begin to recognize it,
4) I eventually walk around it…
5) and finally chooses another street.
It made me wonder whether “Why can’t people just be normal?” is one of my holes.
Let me try to place the pattern in my own experience:
1) I see someone behaving strangely, and I think: Why can’t people just be normal?
2) I see it again, and once again I know exactly what is wrong with them.
3) I notice the familiar thought: Ah… I am judging again.
4) I still see the behaviour, but I no longer need to decide what it says about the person.
5) I choose peace instead of needing the world to fit my idea of normal.
Nothing outside has changed yet. The person may still be talking load. Someone will act crazy. But now I hear the voice.
And that changes something.
A Course in Miracles does not ask me to pretend that every behaviour makes sense, or that I have to believe every story someone tells me. It asks me to notice that my judgment about what I see is mine.
Perhaps “normal” is one of the standards I have quietly written for the world and then forgotten that I wrote it.
People should behave this way….react that way…understand what I understand.
And every time they don’t…
There is my hole again!
Maybe awakening is not reaching a world in which everybody finally behaves normally.
Maybe it is noticing the hole a little sooner.
Until one day I smile, walk around it, and think: Ah yes… that street. I know where that one goes.
And hopefully eventually, I choose another street.
With love and light,
G.