The Only Sane Person

You may be the only truly sane per­son on your block. Look around the restau­rant, you may be the san­est one in the room. The greater the dis­tance between how you think and func­tion and the way those around you do deter­mines this. For the sake of imag­ined secu­rity, we imi­tate each other. Fit­ting in means not being sin­gled out. Who wants to be the object of ridicule for being dif­fer­ent? There is a price to san­ity.
The con­cept of holi­ness is that of being set apart for a pur­pose. It is a call­ing not to fol­low the crowd. It is the one sane thing to do in a world that finds itself imi­tat­ing its low­est ele­ments. Holi­ness is not being self-righteous — far from it. True holi­ness car­ries with it the humil­ity to serve the truly insane and the rel­a­tively insane with gen­tle­ness and love. It is the call to call them out of col­lec­tive insanity…one by one.
We live in Orwellian times. On any given day, you have prob­a­bly been in the lens of as many as twenty to fifty secu­rity cam­eras (more if you live in New York or Lon­don). In the name of secu­rity, we have lost all sorts of pri­vacy. Every­thing you do is mon­i­tored (your bank account, how much water you use, the paper and elec­tronic trail left by your credit cards, every key you click on your com­puter, etc.). Pro­gres­sively, our lives look like an end­less loop going through a never end­ing air­port secu­rity check­point.
You can­not change the big pic­ture of all that is hap­pen­ing around you, but you can par­tic­i­pate in it at a sane level. To do so, you have to be a sort of mod­ern day Jesus — focus­ing on what truly mat­ters and ignor­ing the voices that taunt­ingly pull you toward mass insan­ity. San­ity is painful. It refuses to be numbed by going along to get along. How­ever, like a sore mus­cle from exer­cis­ing, it feels kind of good too. You can find other sane peo­ple by notic­ing their gen­tle smiles and their sub­tle detachment.