On Being Weird

Recently our book club read Sarah Bakewell’s most excellent “At the Existentialists Café,” a study of the 20^th century development of existentialist thought. Though she traced its roots to phenomenological philosophers, her study focusses mainly on the partnership of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and the ways in which they and their contemporaries articulated a substantially new perspective from which to consider life, morality, and action. I enjoyed Bakewell’s writing and interests enough to purchase an earlier book of hers, “How to Live: A Life of Montaigne.”

I had heard of Montaigne but had never examined what he was about. He was just one of those names of influential 16^th century French Renaissance thinkers. Looking into Bakewell’s book, however, I quickly have seen that here is a man who will become one of my all-time heroes, standing in my personal pantheon together with Samuel Pepys, Shunryu Suzuki, and Victor Klemperer. Sometime after a near-fatal accident Montaigne began to write a series of what he coined “essays,” pieces in which he examined his own behaviour and that of others, and most especially, the fluctuations of his own mind, what we now call ‘stream of consciousness.’ He could see that our thoughts and emotions are various and multiple, flowing into areas of certainty and of confusion, of calm and of anxiety, of purpose and of despair. His reflections led him toward a most practical approach to life, one entirely in accord with the current mindfulness movement: live as much as possible in the moment; be aware of but not overthrown by your own emotions and your own ideas or seemingly ‘crazy’ thoughts. Accept them all as a part of being human and know that all humans partake, each in his or her own fashion, of these inner fluctuations. This is what I think of as accepting one’s own manner of being weird.

Some years ago a woman in one of my groups spoke of how she often felt herself to be so different from others around her. The people whom she knew seemed for the most part to “have their shit together,” as she put it. Inwardly she experienced herself as filled with contradictory thoughts and emotions, things which she would never share even with friends out of fear of being perceived as too strange by far. I asked the members of the group to raise their hands if they had ever felt this way. All of us, myself included, put up our hands, acknowledging that we also felt not just ‘odd,’ but downright weird at times. Saying so felt ever-so liberating. It’s become somewhat of a joke in my family to not just admit to, but even to glory in our weirdness. My granddaughter Billie says how much she likes weird. To her it’s almost a badge of honour, a personal distinction.

If we know and are accepting of ourselves as the repositories of contradictions on many levels, even though we manage fairly well to live our day-to-day lives and to handle our responsibilities, it becomes infinitely easier to be understanding and accepting of others whose particular forms of weirdness or otherness differ from our own. In simpler societies individuals who deviated more significantly from the norm were quite often tolerated, even in some cases celebrated for the contributions that their ways of being brought to the society. A case in point: the acceptance of eccentrics is far wider in Britain than here in North America.

I’m just beginning to dip into Bakewell’s reading of Montaigne, but even the introductory chapter has impressed me with his 18^th century example of how to live. My current take-away: accept your own distinct ‘weirdness,’ and that of your friends; rather than fearing it, celebrate the manner in which it reflects the unique being that is you.