Thinking outside should feel lonely

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

Mark Twain. 

For much of my life I desperately wanted to be normal. To simply "fit in" and be accepted by the majority of people around me was my great ambition. But this ambition was never realized, as I found time and again that I simply didn't fit into the generally accepted norms of the society I was trying to be part of. I felt as if I was abnormal, different, odd, weird, wrong, awkward, uncomfortable, stupid, or just a plain old fashioned freak.

But as age crept past adolescence, swept through the twenties, tarried in the thirties and finally came to roost in my forties I found the value of fitting in becoming less attractive and certainly less profitable. Today as a middle aged prophet of the prosaic I find that being a part of the minority tends to indicate I'm on that side of humanity that is actively looking beyond what everyone knows today, as a way of inventing what everyone will know tomorrow.

It helps that I have found a life partner who esteems my tangential approach to life and learning; that I have found a small group of friends who revel in my otherness, and larger communities who reward me for being unorthodox.

But it still irks that trend setting creativity and ground breaking ideas tend to happen in grand isolation or at least in very small groups of isolated pioneers. But, irksome or not, I'd rather breach a new frontier alone than sit in well worn civilized surroundings content to accept the commonly held truths that society has proven beyond a shadow of doubt, which tends to imply that they are probably near or passed being obsolete to that society.

Mr Twain's injunction to be wary of finding oneself among the majority is a philosophy I intentionally enact on a daily basis.