Now who’s the idiot?

There is a man who lives in my town who is kind of a permanent fixture on the green. Every morning, right around rush hour, he can be found doing Tai Chi. Actually, it looks more like he’s in a kung fu battle with a mosquito. But I secretly like to think that he’s conducting the universe. He parks his 10 speed and dances like everyone’s watching. I don’t know his name, but he is out there every day, for all the world to see. And you can see on his face that he loves it.

He is the veritable village idiot. There is one (or more) in every town. These are the souls who aren’t quite grounded in this reality—whether it be drug induced or from good old mother nature. People talk about them, laugh at their expense. We make up names for them—my husband calls him the White Ninja.

When we come a little too close, we get nervous and a little scared. Maybe today is the day that they will snap and actually bite someone. We tend to keep a wide berth between us and these lost souls, who at any given moment may be having a full on conversation with a leaf. But really, what are we scared of? Do we think that their crazy is contagious and might rub off on us? For all we know, the leaf may actually be talking back.

Now, I’m not gonna leave my kids with him for the afternoon or anything, but if we take the time to listen to the rantings of a “crazy person”, maybe those rantings won’t seem so crazy. Just because we can’t see who they’re talking to doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t exist. I personally think that they are tapped into the universe and they can see the things that we wish we could.

Sometimes I have so many random thoughts and ideas running around in my brain that I’m quite frankly surprised that I’m not in a group home. It takes a lot of effort to categorize and organize all of the things swirling around in here and perhaps White Ninja simply chose not to fight the everyday internal battle, threw it all up in the air and decided to take every disjointed thought as it comes. It seems a lot easier that way.

So perhaps the next time you are in the presence of your own local “untethered spirit”, take a moment and instead of laughing at him, take a deep breath and appreciate how beautiful and adaptive the human mind is and how there are so many things we have yet to learn about it. And if that thought makes you feel a little dizzy, just start dancing!