marți, 9 ianuarie 2018

On Extraordinary and the Power of Ordinary

(Photo source: ValenciaGroup)


We like to imagine ourselves as extraordinary, heroes of our very own legend. Slightly challenging to be exceptional in a world of billions, and there is power in being ordinary but better. Picturing ourselves as unique and having a society more often than not prove us wrong leads to frustration, to a bitter aftertaste of a stale lemonade that was meant to be refreshing.  We seek the extraordinary, but we need to struggle with everyday tasks, bills, angry neighbors and boring encounters. There is nothing remarkable in feeding your cat, but there may be.

After all, resilience comes from ordinary processesWhen life gives you lemons and all that cliché…

Fascination, pure enjoyment, and curiosity may transform dull tasks and mundane hustles into sources of extraordinary. Stay at the moment: there are tiny joys to be had in doing the dishes, decorating a Christmas tree, watching a bird rest on a branch outside your window… Don't you have the time for it? What do you have the time for? Does it sound like New Age annoying empty speech? Perhaps. Writing about turning prosaic into poetry may seem… well… prosaic.

There is this book I love a lot: An Extraordinary Absence by Jeff Foster. And Jeff (who does sound New Age-y with a more rational twist, and he keeps this tone in all his books) talks about how we seem to get the thirst for life when we are in limit situations: we value breath more when we don’t have it quite as easily. So why do we need to wait for the limit, for the extraordinary, to enjoy life?

I know that my psychologist would agree that I should adhere to this quote by Jeff as a mantra, she seems to tell me this constantly: 
“Stop thinking your way through life, always trying to work it out before living it. Life is to be lived, not analyzed to death. Feel”

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