Unique according to dictionary.com is having no like or equal; unparalleled; incomparable; not typical or unusual.
What makes you unique? Was the question each person in our book club was assigned. Most of us confessed that it is a hard question to answer. It took us two weeks to come up with an essay explaining how each one of us is unique in our own way. Everyone was to read theirs aloud.
When you are looking at a child, growing up, you would notice that the child has certain traits that his or her peers do not have. Recently a little boy under the age of 4 was very good in scoring goals (initially playfully with his father) and he was signed by a football team to play for them when he is old enough to. Some years ago, a girl child maybe 5 years of age or younger was featured in the Oprah Winfrey Show was very good at reading the map. She pointed at any country (be it in West Africa, Central, Northern or Southern Africa or the Indies, America or Asia) when she was asked to. The parents said that the kid started reading the map when she was 2 years old. With that unique talent, that little girl could be a pilot even before she reaches 18 years.
I call it very gestalt as in Gestalt psychology; choosing the particular out of the common.
I know that we all are very good at pointing out the uniqueness in others, but would spend some days, weeks or even months trying to discover and write out our uniqueness.
You don’t have to look so far but start with the basics like our finger-prints. No two people in the world share the same finger-prints; not even with one’s siblings.
Your eyes- they shine differently and no wonder when you go through customs in the United States, they ask you to look through a device.
Then you can start by saying you surf and always managed to beat your peers or you can’t help picking your nose when you are in public. One would say the corner of his/her mouth always has a life of its own when he talks. That it twitches uncontrollably ever since he or she was little.
Some would say they can do magic; take a rabbit out of a Top hat, make a coin with a stone, make a bird disappear and back with the wink of your eye.
One could say that he/she never went through puberty at the normal age; that it just happened when he /she was 16 years old. See that makes you unique.
Someone in the class said her voice- her power. That it is her voice which tells her apart from most people when she talks. That it is her voice which has helped her achieve a lot.
For some their power is their pen and pencil. What makes writers unique is their ability to make characters, give them life, they make you get to know them and they stuck with you for a long time you feel that you have known the characters all your life. Another person said he can’t help laughing over certain things, that that is him for you.
You can try asking some people what makes them unique and I am sure you will get their brows up, tilt their heads from side to side and finally get this from them, “wait a minute let me think.”
