7/11/16

Today's Horoscope

All signs:

The stars want to remind you that there is no such thing as “normal”.  We want to feel safe and secure, so we decide what everything should be like and label it thusly. Usually those labels are “normal” and a then a whole host of other adjectives usually meant to stigmatize or feel superior to anyone that doesn't conform to our ideals of the status quo.

Thing is, there is no status quo. There is a whole huge world full of diversity and culture and standards most of us never experience. Most people never leave their countries of birth, and rarely even leave their own regional section of that country. They grow up and believe that the whole world should operate the way they do.

We look with scorn at anyone that lives their lives differently. We judge everyone against a phony notion of what's normal, a notion based on our small slice of life we have experienced.  Add to that the biases of our parents and friends and all sorts of propaganda put out by the media, the government, schools, etc, it’s a wonder we tolerate anything at all.

So we all strive to be normal, except that none of us really are.  We are conflicted inside because we feel one way and act another.  We want to fit in, but the different things we feel inside will always be there screaming to be expressed, and at some point they will, be it when you decide you don’t care what others think or when you end up with dementia and start talking about the way you really feel.

The stars want you to consider this:  Style and social rules and beauty standards not only differ from culture to culture, but they differ from year to year or decade to decade in the same cultures.  Everything you think, wear, watch, consume, whatever, is most likely different than it was 10 years ago, and that’s because some wonderful wacky people that didn’t fit in expressed themselves and changed the way the entire world thinks.  

Yesterday's “eccentrics” are today’s “normal”.

So if you want to express yourself, just do it.  Who cares what normal people think?  Normal people don’t make much of a difference on a grand scale.  Normal people don’t drive the world forward.  It’s the oddballs that keep things moving, that stand out and make us think, that give us the motivation and bravado to stand out ourselves.  Diversity is one of mankind's biggest strengths, why would we ever want to stifle it?

The stars are as diverse as it gets.  We like to think of the sun as the version of a “normal” star, but it is one of the least common stars in the galaxy.  We look at it everyday, and take it for granted, but then we look at the pictures of the universe taken by the Hubble telescope, binary systems and huge stars that could swallow a million of our suns, and we marvel and wonder and kids are inspired to take up science and go on to discover the great mysteries of the cosmos.  

The stars say: “Be who you are, not who you think you’re supposed to be.”