A few months ago someone said to me she was just an ‘ordinary’ woman. Puzzled, I asked her to explain.
“Well, I grew up on a council estate and come from a broken home.” As she is one of UK’s top coaches, I didn’t think that was ordinary at all.
So I started researching the meaning people give to this word.
Another friend also thinks she is ordinary: she comes from a very privileged background and yet the restrictions she paces on herself drives her to semi-permanent depression.
Am I ordinary? I’m neither white nor black. Growing up in the apartheid years of South Africa, I never had all the privileges of the whites, neither the severe oppressions of the blacks.
In this context, I associate ‘ordinary’ with “mediocre’.
According to Clinton Swaine, mediocrity is a sin.
I’m through puzzling about ‘ordinary’: I am an unique and precious being, just like all of us!

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