In the spring of 2000, they called off school for an entire week and it wasn’t even snowing. It wasn’t a holiday or a grief period and I had never known a freedom like it. We biked around our neighborhood when we should have been learning math and the wind, it felt different. I got to peek behind the curtain of day. As children, we know not what the radio sings when we aren’t listening. If a tree falls in a forest it does make a sound but that sound changes for its audience. I imagined it something like that. I imagined midday television a spectacle, some grand thing not built for young eyes yet it was all too familiar. I expected to feel disappointment at this discovery yet I found relief. I found comfort in the lacklust and didn’t feel alien to this world.
We all chase extraordinary things. Trying to make great of the okay. With the lead-up to Christmas, I am thinking about these youthful stories and the morals they secretly hold. Strange to me how I don’t remember when Santa no longer existed in my mind as I imagine this moment would’ve been pivotal in my growing. I do, however, remember that first day I should have been in school but wasn’t. When I wasn’t sick or without any real reason. I remember all of that discovery. I was ready for a whole new world (cue popular Disney song) but was faced with something that wasn’t special yet it felt magical.
And then I come to the present day and see people chase extraordinary things without realizing how magical the ordinary can be. How a book and a rainy day is good everywhere and can lift anything from any shoulder. How the right song can make us dance anywhere. Give me some room through because this boy likes to move. We spend so much time thinking of the unreachable when what’s in reach is already spectacular. We are told so often that our lives are not enough by marketing ads, magazine articles, Instagram influencers, etc, that it can be difficult not to believe it but the life you’re living is plenty.
In the spring of 2000, me and a couple friends rode bikes through a town we’d seen thousands of times and it was the ordinary that wowed us. Today, this week, for the rest of the year and all the years that follow, let’s pay attention to that ordinary and find the magic in it. In our every day there is so much under-appreciation. We think the answer is a complex equation when it could be as simple as ‘you+sofa*rainy day / new book=happiness’ - find the ordinary and realize how much more it is.
Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary…that’s where it’s at.