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Browsing Tag

life

Our extraordinary, ordinary lives

“A life without the extraordinary is a life unlived.”

“If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.”

The internet is awash with pictures and quotes exhorting us to live an incredible life. We like them, we share them, we save them to our ‘inspiration’ folder. But do they make us feel a bit, you know…

…ordinary?

Follow that dreamEvery day now, we see staggering achievements from high fliers in every field, often as they happen. You start to get the impression that the world is full of people doing the most unbelievably spectacular things. And you’d be excused if you just threw up your hands. I mean, once you’ve seen someone skydive from outer space…

Of course, the flip side of that is TV shows packaging the ordinary as something astounding. The Kardashians seem kapable of selling anything, including a karefully krafted kharade. (That last one almost worked!)

So what really counts as extraordinary, anyway?

If you ask me, the most extraordinary thing about us isn’t the flashy, splashy achievements. It’s our fortitude in getting through every minute of every day, the mundane, ever-turning cogs of going to work and coming home, laundry and groceries, bills and housework. It’s our strength in surviving the run-of the-mill but agonising lows that we often don’t even see coming.

And it’s our ability, through all that, to keep dreaming. To hold onto high hopes and imagination, and the determination to make something happen. And, when we take a moment, to see the magic that’s there in the most commonplace things. The backyard miracle of a squishy caterpillar utterly transformed. The way a baby’s eyes change colour as he grows. That rush when you look at someone and know your life’s about to change. (The kind of things that writers collect and treasure!)

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. – Albert Einstein

The most amazing stuff of life is in the hearts of the people who share our path, and the way we love each other. If we’re lucky, it’s a long, ordinary journey with them by our side. With our eyes open, the little stuff is as spectacular as the big stuff. Lots of people dream of writing a book one day – and maybe everyone does have a book in them! But anyone’s life could BE a book. And an extraordinary one at that. Walking down the street, on any regular day, you’ll pass perfectly regular people living the most inspiring, heartbreaking and uplifting ordinary stories.

So we’ll keep dreaming, and making those plans, small and big. Maybe we won’t kash in with a krazy kareer – but that’s kool. We might find that what we do turns out to be something extraordinary after all.

 

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