Tonight Ania, Marta and I took in Teatro Zinzanni's tent filled with wonders: circus/dinner/theatre where performers mingle with attendees and you never know who's next to shed working role and swing from trapeze, perform intricate contortions or wrap sex itself into an aerial dance of translucent curtain and sheer daring.

As I scanned the crowd's rapt expressions, I realized the division, the separation between audience and performer, between passive viewer and actively viewed... creator and taker.

As Svetlana the Russian princess of contortion worked her pliable body in defiance of the form "everyone knows" people take... as Bianca Sapetto spun through air with only tenuous connection to safety and security yet made it look easy as breathing... as Les Petits Frères jumped from the ground and into motion as spinning cartwheels and stacks of men three high without benefit of ladders or launchers... I realized the problem.

I was inspired tonight to greater action, larger roles in the stage I know as Life, a grasping of the power in each and every one of us to change, re-arrange and create.

How many of us roll through life without true excellence in anything, adept at nothing save passive absorption? How many of us base decisions for the path we walk on what will pay the bills and what "seems like a good idea?" How many people wish to "live a normal life" within the "normal range" of human abilities because "we all know" it's what we all should want, bowing to the pressure of peers and policy, making "No" an answer to the calling of our true selves?

Tonight, these exceptional performers were a perfect image of the life we all could live, in anything we bring formidable will and desire to bear upon. There was no passivity, no waiting, no watching. It was all doing and daring and making it so.

You will revolutionize your life by simply refusing to accept imaginary limitations wrought from air by social control and laziness.

You must surmount only one problem.

The problem is your accepted definition of "normal."

Wait... let me get the emphasis correct.

The problem is your accepted definition of "normal."