Finding Beauty in the Ordinary
Change your perspective, change your experience
No matter who you are or what your days look like, life can always be fun, joyful, and filled with beauty.
It’s all in how you choose to see things, especially when looking at those “ordinary” days.
In other words, you have the power to find beauty in the ordinary.
You don’t have to wait for the next extravagant getaway, concert, or a night out with friends to feel that your life is beautiful. Whether there is beauty around you or not is all in the lens you use to view your life.
You can always flip the perspective—from how you view your home, your job, or your daily routines to how you choose to look at the more challenging experiences you’ve lived through. Our experiences and the feelings that stick with us after our experiences are born from our perspective.
How do you choose to see your life?
Do you choose to view it as a mundane slog where every day feels the same? Are you going to let familiarity blind you from the beauty that each day brings?
A person who can always find the beauty in their life is beyond powerful. They are powerful because whether or not they have a good day isn’t up to anyone or anything else. It’s up to them. They hold the power.
The truth is, we can all be that person.
But many of us are hyper-focused on our problems—too focused on what we don’t have or what we can’t do.
It’s a challenge—to re-program your mindset. But it’s a challenge worth facing. Resilience isn’t simply about gritting your teeth through pain and suffering. Sometimes resilience takes on the form of gratitude and joy. Joy for everything you get to do. Joy for the blessings in your life today.
No matter the state of your life, no matter what isn’t going right, the decision to love your life is one you can make at any time.
Presence and novelty
Finding beauty in the ordinary begins and ends with presence. Tune in completely to the life you’re living right now.
The warm water that hits your face in the morning as you get ready to start your day. The sound of coffee brewing. The hug you give to a good friend you see often. These are all beautiful moments happening within the realm of the ordinary. Sink into them and engage with what’s happening at any given moment.
Rather than feeling obligated to keep the same routines every single day, switch things up. Take a different route to work. Eat dinner on your patio. Go to a restaurant you’ve never been to and sit down for a meal all by yourself. Read some poetry. Shit, write some poetry.
Life’s true joys aren’t reserved for lavish trips, wild nights, or new purchases. They can instead be found when you realize that you have more control over what gets your attention. What do you choose to see? What do you choose to appreciate?
The simple joys that keep us grounded can be found in good conversations, pursuing meaningful goals, helping others, or doing something like spending time in nature—letting your mind wander and literally breathing in life.
These are all things that can be done on an ordinary day. They can be done for free. And they can be done over and over again—serving as individual fountains of energy and life.
There is beauty all around you. You just have to choose to see it.
Recognizing abundance
For better or worse, most of us become accustomed to our jobs, the foods we eat, the clothes we wear, and the people we associate with. Our baseline of happiness is constantly moving, keeping most people in a state of dissatisfaction, even when they get the things they once wished for.
When you get too comfortable it becomes easier to take your life for granted. Routines become prisons, locking us away from adaptability and spontaneity.
Even more, a routine can blind us to all the abundance in our lives. I feel it in myself all the time. I’ll float through the day and won’t realize how I got from one task to the next. I get lost in my head and lose any sense of presence. I am on autopilot more than I’d care to admit—a passenger who is merely watching as life passes him by.
Staying present and grateful has always been a challenge for me. I am (and will probably always be) a work in progress in this area of my life. I reflect on the eras of my life and feel a tightness in my chest as I surrender to the reality that many moments have passed me at warp speed.
But even at my lowest, there was always plenty to be grateful for. I just have to keep reminding myself of this. Rushing through my life with the hope of getting to the next memorable moment in my life isn’t leading me any closer to contentment. There is no prize at the end of the road for those of us who speed through the experience of living.
I still have to remind myself to slow down. Life is happening right now, not some day in the future when all my problems are gone (when in fact, the reality is my problems will simply evolve to fit where I am at that stage in my life).
Today can be memorable and beautiful if that’s what you want it to be.
I wish the younger me had learned this lesson. There was beauty all around me then and there’s beauty all around me now.
