Tell them

I ran across a quote from Neil Gaiman yesterday. It went something like

"You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different."

Actually, it went exactly that like that. It's the sort of advice I'm instinctively inclined to take to heart, much like another quote I came across in my youth that's stuck with me throughout the years: "Dare to be different". It also makes me wonder if I haven't been taking too much for granted recently, that perhaps I've a tendency to look at the world around me as an enormous, irritating, noisy whole, rather than paying closer attention to it's myriad constituent parts, a great many of which are rather wonderful. Consider yourselves amongst them,

Cynicism seems to be running rampant these days. I tell myself I don't subscribe to it, and certainly I do so less than a large number of people I know or work with, but even then I can't help but smirk at the likes of despair.com, a site resplendant with such bon mots as:

Always remember that you are unique. Just like everbody else.

It's funny, but at the same time also rather sad. Likely it's funny because it's sad. People in society today seem torn between asserting their individuality and desperately trying to fit in, with the need for the latter, from personal observation, often overriding the need for the former. I managed to avoid peer pressure at school by taking the easy way out of simply having no friends (alright, I confess, it wasn't necessarily that easy - it took a lot of work, and even then I still had a couple left). As such, I've never been too concerned with the notion of fitting in - the outsiders perogative, if you will. But perhaps because of that I've developed my own skewed form of cynicism, casting myself as the outsider in opposition to a world which I'm not making the effort to view in detail, instead picturing it as nothing more than a grey, amorphous blob.

Time to peer closer. Tell them what makes this one different.

Indeed.