Terminal Uniqueness

I think I might have gotten it wrong. Thinking back to my days in the classroom, I can see how hard I worked as a teacher to get students to see their uniqueness. No matter who it was, I wanted him or her to see that there was no one with the same gifts and talents. I celebrated every time a student claimed their one-of-a-kind nature, but I now see I should have worked just as hard to teach them the opposite lesson: despite our uniqueness, we’re all alike.

I hang out with people who recognize they have the disease of “terminal uniqueness.” No matter the situation, we can make anything all about us. The results are sometimes as hilarious as they are tragic. The magic comes when we stand back and see how similar we are to one another. The fear I have is the same fear the person across the room has; the mistake a person made is just like the one we’ve all made. Slowly, we remove the cloaks of originality and hang them on the hooks by the door and bask in the things we have in common. Everybody’s got their “stuff” (not the word I want to use) but as singular as that stuff may seem, it’s not. Learning this changes everything.

In the bible, it says we are marvelously made, and we are. Out of the clay, each of us was created as a one-of-a-kind work of art, but we were made out of the same clay. We’ve lived lives that, on the surface, look different, but if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we can learn that we are, beneath the surface, alike. In a world that only looks for what separates or divides us, finding what unites us seems refreshingly new. One might even say, divine.