A friend I met at a writing workshop sent me an article by a woman named Dr Nadine Levy. The lead-in was “What If Your Life Turned Out To Be Ordinary?” I don’t know this friend super well but he knows me well enough, probably from things I write, to know sometimes I am in search of more. Not more money. Not more possessions. More oomph. More things to satisfy my unending curiosity. More excitement. But not like the kind of excitement I’d get by driving a motorcycle over a cliff with my hair on fire. Just a little less ordinariness. The article suggests embracing the everyday. The more we do that, the more interesting the ordinary can become. The goal, at least according to that writer, is to recognize that ordinary is not the opposite of special. Embracing the ordinary as openings “that invite us to relinquish our self-focused drive to be someone else or somewhere else and instead surrender to what is”. To me, it fits right in with a lot of Buddhist thinking I already like and try to incorporate into my life so I found it self-affirming. I say I “try” to incorporate these things into my life because I have greater and lesser success depending on the day. I love what the psychologist Jack Kornfield said and she quotes: “After the ecstasy, the laundry”. I showed the article to my husband and he was slightly perplexed. We’ve been married for over 50 years and I think have lived essentially the same lives yet he said he has always thought his life has been anything BUT ordinary. I love that.

Here’s the link to the actual article:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/20/how-to-enjoy-an-ordinary-unremarkable-life

Photo courtesy Leonhard_Niederwimmer at Pixabay.com