Finding Meaning In The Mundane
The Key To An Extraordinary Life
How do I go from ordinary to extraordinary?
Every time I think about this question, I end up getting an answer which is linked to success. We measure ours and everyone else’s worth through parameters that are linked to success — the money, the achievements, the titles, and fame.
The majority of us have put success on a pedestal and considered it to be that one factor that determines how extraordinary our lives can be.
One extremely valuable experience I had in the past few months was watching ‘About Time’ — a movie that teaches us the value of time in each of the relationships we have & beautifully tells us that the most interesting moments in the world are actually the normal & mundane ones. The story asks us to grasp relationships and life in every form and to take as much as possible from the little things.
Interestingly, every time I listen to a favorite song or watch a movie I love, I somehow start recollecting the memories from the time I first heard or watched it. And every time I think about an extremely special day I’ve had in the past, I realize that it’s memorable only because of the people. Indirectly or directly, it's the people that made those days so exceptional — the laughs, cries, the madness, the beautiful conversations together.
Think about it, we expand and grow in all aspects of life through people. Whether it's work or our everyday life, we advance in every phase through the people we know, the ones we care about, and the ones who are a part of our lives. I’m definitely not talking about just the generic business ‘network’. I’m talking about everyone — the employees, the relatives, the house help, the fitness trainer, the colleagues, and every other person whom we’re regularly involved with.
More than anything else, it's the quality and depth of one’s relationships that make the life of an ordinary person — wholesome and extraordinary.
But here’s what you may be wondering. In order to truly enjoy the small yet beautiful moments in a day and to cultivate deep relationships, isn’t it important to be positive, to be happy?
However, the ideas of positivity & happiness are very commercialized. Today, there are thousands of life coaches with their own unique ‘formula’ to happiness and practically speaking, being positive about everything is easier said than done. Life is suffering and as and when we taste it — we realize that.
What better example of this than the last year. How do you deal with something you never thought you’d have to experience? Something that occurs once in a hundred years? How do you adapt to a completely different world, a bunch of new habits, a completely new routine & the fact that you are confronted with your mortality every single day?
In the last 8 months, I questioned everything that I was or wasn’t doing. I gradually even started falling into a ‘fatalist’ mindset with a YOLO attitude. I started questioning the need to care about a career, money, status, or anything else when we live in such a firmly destined world where anything & everything can be taken away from us within no time?
In the chapter “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street” from the book ‘The 12 Rules For Life’ by Dr. Jordan Peterson, he tries to tell us what we should do, when tragic things are happening in front of us and we’re powerless and no matter how much we try, it just feels impossible to see the bright side.
According to him, a part of the solution lies in keeping your eyes open and finding small little moments in your everyday mundane life like a family get together, a cup of good coffee, having a dialogue with oneself, a sunrise, a long drive, good music or petting an animal can help us re-center, laugh, and get a positive shift in our perspective.
Maybe we should even try to truly focus on the food while eating, genuinely think about the person we’re talking to, enjoy and feel nature in its real sense while we travel, and even think about all our basic abilities that we’ve taken for granted — the fact that we can normally see, walk and run and maybe then we can clearly understand the other side.
However impractical it sounds, notice all the good, big and small in a world wherein the bad things seem so deafening. In choosing to do just that one act, you improve yourself, the lives of those around you, and do your part to be an anecdote to struggle.
