Her fingers moved across the keyboard like Gypsy moths flittering around a candle flame. She had entered a contest to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. She won. That same year, this 15-year old had produced, directed and edited an award winning documentary on women’s issues. She also had  a screen play produced and has written two other screen plays. A freak of nature.

Coming home from a movie he would play the theme song on his tiny child’s synthesizer. When he was 12 he picked up a guitar for the first time. After a few minutes fiddling around, he was playing spontaneously self-composed riffs up and down the guitar neck. He sat down at the church piano and began playing a beautiful harmonic composition. When questioned about the source he replied that he had “just made it up.” A freak of nature.

On his 67th birthday our neighbor incline pressed 320 pounds five times. His hypomanic behavior demands no more than four hours of sleep each night. Arising at 3:00 AM he completes the combined crossword puzzles from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today in less than 30 minutes. Wow! Contemplate that. A freak of nature.

You, too, encounter them in your family or in the neighborhood. The fantastically productive we read about. A few come quickly to mind.

There is the theoretical physicist and Shakespeare quoting (I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space) Stephen Hawking who as a PhD candidate would amble into the Cambridge classroom 10 minutes before the lecture began and successful solve the assigned problems that the rest of the class had spent a week attempting to decipher.

Or consider Michael Crichton author, screenwriter, film director and producer best known for his work in science fiction (Jurassic Park), medical fiction and thriller genres. As a Harvard medical student he would saunter into the lab just before midnight and begin reviewing pathology slides with all the other students gathered around learning from his comments. While in medical school he wrote five well-reviewed novels under a pseudonym. 

Then there are athletes Bo Jackson, LeBron James, Jose Altuve. Freaks of nature all.

What about those of us who flutter around the center of the bell shaped curve? We can enjoy the  astounding production of the freaks. And we can remember that from the poorest of the poor performers to the extraordinarily prodigious God loves us all

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