the (extra)ordinary beauty of life

Lately, I’ve been circling around this idea of what it means to have an “extraordinary” life. What is it with the flashy, picture-perfect idealist world everyone is chasing - fame, success, financial freedom, some big legacy?

But it makes me wonder: if we all want to be extraordinary, doesn’t that make it just…ordinary?

And maybe the better question is, what is so wrong with enjoying our “ordinary” life? And I don’t mean ordinary as in the uninspired, beige sweater wearing kind of way. I mean a life that isn’t shaped by constant comparison or feeling like you need to win at everything you do to feel like enough. It almost seems like the word “ordinary” is an insult these days, like if your life isn’t constantly filled with more, more, more, then somehow you’re doing it wrong.

Isn’t there something beautiful about finding fulfillment in the “ordinary”?

There’s so much beauty in the mundane

I think about what makes up a truly great day. It’s hardly ever the huge moments or milestones. It’s the quiet moments: the first sip of an iced latte on a hot summer day, the way the sun creates beautiful shapes on the sidewalk, walking through the city and overhearing people crack jokes that remind you of your friends. There’s nothing groundbreaking about these moments, but they make me smile, and make it feel like life is good.

There’s this Annie Dillard quote I always return to:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”

So maybe the goal is to stop believing life only starts when the impressive things begin.

The myth of more

I think ambition is a great thing. Goal setting, color coding my notes sheet 50 ways, optimizing my Notion workflow - these are things I spend sizable portions of my time on. But if success is always only defined by the next thing, at what point is it just another treadmill you can’t jump off? Will you ever feel like you’ve arrived?

I can’t say that some people don’t truly enjoy the chase. Maybe the constant feeling of wanting more brings them bliss, and I can’t judge that. But for me, learning to enjoy what I already have right in front of me is like a secret code to fulfillment.

Redefining the extraordinary

So what if we start defining things differently? What if instead of thinking “Am I extraordinary enough?”, we start asking ourselves, “Am I actually enjoying this life?”

I’ll start. Here are some of my favorite moments this month, none of which had anything to do with any big milestones:

• Drinking tea in total silence at 7:42am, watching the sunlight slowly spill across the kitchen floor.

• Laughing so hard with a friend about absolutely nothing that I snorted and spilled water on my shirt.

• The feeling of peeling an orange in one perfect spiral and feeling weirdly proud of it.

• Watching two pigeons fight over a bag of chips like it was the most important moment in the universe.

• Walking past a bakery and hearing a song from 2007 that made me feel like a kid again for exactly nine seconds.

• Remembering a joke my dad once told me out of nowhere, and laughing in the middle of doing laundry.

• Watching condensation gather on a glass of iced water in slow motion and thinking, “This is what time feels like.”

I think the real flex is if you can appreciate the life you have, without needing it to be shiny or impressive all the time - and it doesn’t mean to give up your dreams or settle for anything less than what you want. It means along the way, in the process of building your life, you’re not forgetting to actually live it. You’ll be here, fully present, for every small, beautiful, ordinary moment that makes up every single day.