All about being ‘Normal’

All about being ‘Normal’...

1. Normal is anything that makes us forget who we are and what we want: that way we can work in order to produce, reproduce and earn money.
2. Spending years studying at university only to find at the end of it all that you are unemployable.
3. Working from nine till five everyday at something that gives you no pleasure at all just so that, after thirty years, you can retire.
4. Retiring and discovering that you no longer have enough energy to enjoy life and dying a few years later of sheer boredom.
5. Believing that power is much more important than money and that money is much more important than happiness
6. Making fun of anyone who seeks happiness rather than money and accusing them of ‘lack of ambition’
7. Believing that your parents are always right.
8. Getting married, having children and staying together long after all love has died, saying that it’s for the good of the children (who are, apparently, deaf to the constant rows)
9. Criticizing anyone who tries to be different.
10. Walking up every morning to an hysterical alarm clock on the bedside table.
11. Believing absolutely everything that appears in print.
12. Wearing  scrap of coloured cloth around your neck, even though it serves no purpose, but which answers to the name of ‘tie’
13. Never asking s direct question, even though the other person can guess what it is you want to know.
14. Keeping a smile on your lips even when you’re on the verge of tears. Feeling sorry for those who show their feelings.
15. Believing that all famous people have tons of money saved up.
16. Standing facing the door in the lift and pretending you’re the only person there, regardless of how crowded it is.
17. Never laughing too loudly in a restaurant however good the joke.
18. Assuming, as you grow older, you’re the guardian of world’s wisdom, even if you have not necessarily lived enough to know what’s right and wrong.
19. Going to a charity tea party and thinking that you’ve done your bit towards putting an end to social inequality in the world.
20. Eating three times in a day even if you are not hungry.
21. Marrying the first person who offers you a decent position in the society. Love can wait.
22. Always saying ‘I tried’ when you didn’t try at all.
23. Postponing doing the real interesting things in life for later, when you wont have the energy.
24. Avoiding depression with large daily doses of television.
25. Thinking that being a good, decent, respectable person will mean that others will see you as weak, vulnerable and easy to manipulate.
26. Being equally convinced that aggression and rudeness are synonymous with having a ‘powerful personality’
27. Being afraid of having an endoscopy (if you are a man) and giving birth (if you are a woman)

Excerpts from ‘The Winner Stands Alone’ by Paulo Cohlo