The Miraculously Mundane
Isn’t it funny that you only appreciate having good health on mornings when you wake up with a stuffy nose? Kleenex in hand, you find yourself praying to the nose gods, if you let me breathe normally again I promise to be thankful for every day of good health you give me!
Why is it that we wait until we are miserable with a cold to be thankful (retroactively) for all the days we wake up in good health? There are so many ways for our bodies to let us down, ailments we are susceptible to, isn’t it a bit of a miracle that we have any days of optimal health? Yet, it requires the loss of our own good health, or the health of someone close to us, to remind us of how fortunate we are to be healthy.
Recently, I realized that I held a similarly backwards perspective towards life in general. Despite all of the millions of ways for every moment in life to go disastrously wrong, I woke up everyday with the expectation that life would or should go well.
This unrealistic expectation that things should go well left me without many moments for gratitude. I constantly overlooked all of the miraculously mundane moments of my life where nothing went wrong because I perceived those moments as normal i.e. not worthy of being noticed. To trigger a moment of gracious reflection, life either had to go exceptionally well (which, by definition, doesn’t happen often) or horribly wrong, at which point I could only reflect on my past and appreciate how lucky I had been.
This lack of gratitude, of not being as appreciative as I should have been, left me feeling a bit empty.
It became clear to me that I needed to lower my bar of expectations. I needed to approach life by acknowledging that there were a million more ways for every moment to go wrong than there were for it to go exceptionally well. That any moment where something didn’t go wrong had defied the odds. By making this mental shift, I could begin to notice and appreciate these miraculously mundane moments in my everyday life and feel a newfound appreciation for them.
To force this perspective in myself, I began, in mundane moments, to reflect on how much worse life could be. As I sipped my morning coffee, I imagined it spilling onto my lap right before a big meeting at work. As I pulled into the parking lot of my office, I imagined a flat tire forcing me to push my motorbike in the hot sun to the closest mechanic. Walking out of a routine doctors appointment, I imagined how I would feel if I had just been diagnosed with a life-threatening disease.
In these daydreams, I also imagined how badly I would be wishing for mundanity if I were living the experiences I imagined. In the moment I spilled my coffee, I would be wishing for nothing more than to not have spilled it. Pushing my motorbike from a flat tire, I would reflect with envy on all the boring, uneventful drives to work I had enjoyed. Walking out of the doctor’s office with the knowledge of having a serious illness, I would be wishing for nothing more than to return to a time of good health.
In these little daydreams, the imaginary me was always longing for the unremarkable reality I was actually experiencing. And by imagining a less-fortunate version of myself and feeling his envy for my current situation, I couldn’t help but experience very real feelings of gratitude for having the chance to enjoy just another normal day.
The challenge with tricking yourself into noticing the miraculously mundane in this way is that it requires us to face one of life’s uncomfortable truths: that suffering for all of us is an integral part of the human experience. From the inconvenient to the life-changing, life can, and often does, go horribly wrong.
These moments of inconvenience and tragedy don’t need to be downplayed. Spilling coffee on your lap before work is frustrating. Losing a parent or a friend is devastating. But we can use these moments of suffering, both big and small, to appreciate the miraculously mundane moments that life offers each of us every day. Acknowledging that a deadly car crash could happen suddenly makes an uneventful drive to work something to be thankful for.
Not only does this shift in perspective help us appreciate the small, simple moments in life, it also helps prepare us for when tragedy does strike. Maybe a parent’s death is slightly less tragic if we have the assurance of knowing we took the time to be grateful for those simple, unremarkable moments chatting over coffee. Maybe it is easier to laugh when we do spill coffee on ourselves if we have appreciated each time that we didn’t.
Life is inescapably tragic, frustrating, heartbreaking, and painful. But we certainly don’t help ourselves by expecting to be the exception to that rule. We all suffer. And by acknowledging this, we can use those darker moments to help us recognize and appreciate when life is beautifully simple, unremarkable, or even boring.
And maybe that can help us all breathe a little easier.
Got a hankering for more? You can read more of my posts on Medium publication Letters to a Young Professional, you can check out my blog 12HourDifference.co for my thoughts on launching an international career and you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter to chat about…whatever you’d like!
