It’s OK to be weird–so long as you don’t stay there forever.

The word itself has a weird history, its modern usage derivable from Shakespeare’s MacBeth where we read of weird sisters, wayward and wonderful, fantastical and prophetic.

Thus does weird come to take on the trappings of “the supernatural,” “the other-worldly,” “the wonderful,” “the uncanny and mysterious.” Later on, as the secular age unfolds, a weird one is simply thought to be “strange,” “odd,” “eccentric.” While the attribution of metaphysical powers has ceased, the feeling of unease around the felt-to-be weird one remains.

If, like me, you’ve been thought weird, then I say to you: it’s OK to be weird. Only, don’t stay here forever.

Three common options present themselves to you and none is a good place to rest. First, you can regard yourself as inferior to the rest; second, as superior to “the hoi polloi”; third, as simply different. And you might, in fact, find yourself cycling from inferiority to superiority to sheer difference–and back again.

Far simpler, and better, to embrace a fourth option: plainly, it’s just OK to be weird. Nothing terrible (inferior), nothing grand (superior), and nothing removed (different) about it. To embrace the OK-ness of being weird is to begin resting into equanimity (upekkha).

But you can’t stay here. Do you see why? Because doing so still holds in place the sense of separation from which “weirdness” arose in the first place. You need to make the journey home. Or home needs to find you.

“But I don’t want to be the same as all the rest!” (What are holding onto?) No need and besides that is a mistake too. To come home is to discover a perspective where a single reality makes possible the emergence of a multiplicity of differences. Realizing “it’s all one in the end” entails no longer making any fuss about apparent weirdnesses.

After all, all sentient beings, in some salient respect or another, are weird! And all sentient beings, in virtue of being this one reality, are as unweird as unweird could be! Ha, what a beautiful cosmic joke this is!