Becoming Extraordinary
by Sara Flitner
Abraham Lincoln was born poor, prone to ill-health, and afflicted by bouts of crippling depression. He was neither fancy nor handsome and spoke with a high-pitched tone. In his rise to the U.S. presidency, he was deceived by close confidants and nearly died of exhaustion more than once, then again from grief over the loss of his young son, Eddie.
Somewhere in President Lincoln’s grief, exhaustion, and depression was a pull even stronger than the pull toward his own safety: the end of slavery, and the hope for freedom.
Among many of the heroes and heroines we can name, there is a common storyline. Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, Helen Keller—all started “ordinary,” with little personal advantage. A persistent question worried and worried the edges of their mind until it became prominent, the kindling of purpose. This kind of possibility moves like fire to the heart. As long as that fire burns, as long as that actor has breath, everything – failure, grief, tyranny – is engulfed by purpose. Ordinary people become the narrators of the world’s most lasting narratives.
Figures who tell the hero’s journey with their lives, the ones who make history in their contributions to the betterment of humanity, become extraordinary when their own ambition or success is sublimated by a vision for a better way forward for the many. When head and heart govern together, gain only for oneself becomes empty. It is no longer enough to have your own needs met.
Not all of us live out this truth like Harriet Tubman, for example, who clawed her way to freedom in the North, only to turn around and physically usher others to safety.
A hero knows her own heart, and the heart knows its responsibility to feel the weight of heavy things and let them remain heavy until the pressure demands change. The invitation here is not to harden the heart, or to imagine you can work around it by doing things that please only the head. We have lots of options to buy more, conquer more, safeguard our own interests more. The hero’s heart knows this lie well, and doesn’t fall for it.
When confusion reigns and the body grows weary, the head offers up a lot of knee-jerk reactions. Fight fire with fire. Become more like the ones doing damage.
The heart will ask better questions: What am I fighting for? What do I love? What can I do to help that which I love, those whom I love? How can I love more?
In our ordinariness is a hero’s choice: become like the ones who despise or become a warrior, leaning towards loving beyond what you love already.
Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn, who taught mindfulness in the face of war and suffering, is a good teacher for our community now. He showed that presence is a form of resistance—and healing. Presence. Not being asleep to what is happening, and also not allowing it to turn us into what we despise. To become so strong in our minds that we use our energy not to rail against bad actors, but to take action to change. Some of us will go down in history for stopping a war or writing so much on topics of poverty or disease or justice that human rights inch forward. Most of us will be called to smaller stages of family dining tables or the breakroom with colleagues who fight against what we hold dear.
We are given a multitude of opportunities in our ordinary lives to let the heavy stay heavy, when instinct might goad us to rise in anger or turn away completely. “When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself,” Thich Nhat Hahn once wrote.
The hero’s journey begins when we wake up to the fact that we all suffer, and it is our reaction to pain that causes the suffering. The difference between hero and tyrant is simply in recognizing that the first step is not action, but stillness, a stillness that allows us to grieve what is painful, instead of using it as fuel to make others feel that pain, too.
They say that any courageous journey begins with a single step, and I always envisioned a strong foot rising up and then coming down on a true path. Now I see the first step as a tired man, sitting hunched over a desk perhaps strewn with messages from battlefields in his own country. His first step might last a bit, and may look like nothing at all is happening. At some point, the tired man will stand and carry his frame into the world with a desire to meet the pain of others until they, too, can carry on.
This is where ordinary becomes extraordinary, and you will know it by the shoulders, drooping but true.