Get Weird by CJ Casciotta

Author:CJ Casciotta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FaithWords
Published: 2018-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

Our attempts to live out of our true selves, our Sacred Weird, often seem to present themselves as squeaks and scratches, bruises and blemishes.

But if there’s one thing I love about the Eucharist, it’s the same thing every kid knows after a long, hard day on the playground: that our scrapes and scars are what make us sacred.

There are no failures to a child who hasn’t yet gotten the weird kicked out of her. There are simply experiments, an infinite universe of what-ifs to be explored. She is a glad scientist. Life is a laboratory for her. Her scraped knees and imperfect scribbles are simply evidence of an adventure worth taking, made all the more meaningful because they came with nuggets to learn from.

At some point the very lines of our scribbles change and we start giving those experiments the name I previously mentioned: failures. This new precarious title gives us a convenient excuse to stop asking “What if?” from the vantage point of wonder, and to begin asking the same question from a new angle of anxiety and self-preservation. “What if I can?” slowly morphs into “What if I cannot?” We start shutting down all things weird, unknown, and untested for safe, reliable, and Same.

What if we treated what we perceive as failures to sweep under the rug as experiments to pursue, learn from, and share with others? What if we risked, dared, and imagined with open hands, knowing that the scrapes will come either way, whether we choose to act or not? In this scenario, however, the scrapes eventually heal, making you stronger.

Researcher and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this phenomenon antifragility. He posits that the opposite of fragile isn’t robust, because while fragile things break when met with disruption, robust things simply remain the same. The true opposite of fragile is antifragile. When something is antifragile, it actually improves when it comes into contact with stress, resistance, and disruption.xxvi

For those who partake in the Eucharist, this is the resurrection.

For those willing to experiment, this is what learning feels like.

For those who open up their true selves to rejection, this is the still, small voice that whispers, “It’s not up to them.”

Our weird scratching and squeaking, our rough sketches and storyboarding, our awkward pauses, and even our total air balls…they’re all a hallelujah (or “God be praised”).

They’re the secret chords that evoke the Sacred Weird and send us into a future where the childish, lowly, and forgotten lost causes, once left for dead, come back to life stronger than anyone could’ve ever imagined.

Well, any grown-up at least.

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