Love Your Ordinary

A dear friend recently offered me some advice and guidance — “love your ordinary.”

In a younger time of life, I can remember rejecting such notions. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to compete. I wanted to excel at everything. Job. Sports. Family.

Such desires to do well are natural. Whether as a young person, a middle aged person, or as an aging person. There is something to celebrate in any of our desires to do well, to learn, to improve.

Such desires also have a punishing side when not accompanied by a love of the ordinary. Or when steeped in competitive attitude that creates distorted binary perception — if you are not winning, you are losing.

The wisdom of a few years of living has taught me that not everything in life’s path is extraordinary. That learning to love the ordinary with the extraordinary is itself, well, extraordinary. Indulge me.

For many of us, we are sold a prominent story of accomplishments and smooth sailing. We buy the story. It’s hard not to.

However, also for many of us, the complexity of life, and some good friends, and some community — they wake us to the reality of failures and rough seas. Ordeals too are part of our extraordinary lives that compel us to a shared realness together. Which is rather extraordinary right.

I’m grateful for dear friends. That aren’t trying to razzmatazz life’s journey into something falsely smooth and exaggerated. I’m grateful for wisdom in them that cuts through sensationalism in its many forms. I’m grateful for dear friends that remind me to love my ordinary and to love the ordinary in the world.