You Are Allowed to Love an Ordinary Life

 

Somewhere along the way, an ordinary life became something we were supposed to escape.

We are encouraged to dream bigger, go farther, accomplish more, become more. We are told to make lists of places we want to see and things we want to do before it is too late. Hobbies become side businesses. Quiet interests become opportunities to build a following. A free afternoon becomes time we could be using to improve ourselves. Even rest seems to need a purpose now. We rest so that we can be more productive tomorrow.

It can leave us with the strange impression that simply enjoying our lives is not quite enough.

Perhaps we should be doing more with them.

I don't think there is anything wrong with ambition. It is good to have dreams. It is good to learn something new, travel somewhere we have always wanted to go, work toward a goal, or discover that we are capable of something we once thought impossible.

But a beautiful life does not have to be an extraordinary one.

Most of life, after all, happens on perfectly ordinary days.

It happens while the coffee is brewing in the morning and sunlight is beginning to find its way through the windows. It happens while dinner is cooking, laundry is tumbling in the dryer, and the same familiar programs are waiting for us in the evening. It happens in conversations that will never be remembered word for word, in books read quietly in bed, in errands and meals and Sunday afternoons.

These moments are rarely the ones we imagine when we think about making the most of our lives.

And yet they are our lives.

The Pressure to Become Someone Else

We have never had so many opportunities to look into other people's lives.

At any hour of the day, we can see someone renovating a beautiful house, moving to another country, starting a business, travelling through Europe, learning a language, transforming their body, publishing a book, or beginning an entirely new chapter.

Much of it can be inspiring.

But inspiration has a way of quietly turning into comparison if we are not careful.

A perfectly pleasant day can suddenly seem terribly small after watching someone else's highlight reel. The home we liked five minutes ago needs updating. The town where we live feels boring. The hobby we enjoyed seems pointless because we aren't doing anything with it. We begin wondering whether we should be reinventing ourselves too.

There is always another version of ourselves we could be working toward.

More accomplished. More interesting. More adventurous. More disciplined. More successful.

It is exhausting.

Perhaps we don't always need to become someone new.

Perhaps sometimes we are allowed to settle more comfortably into who we already are.

Not Everything Needs to Become Something

I think we have lost some of our ability to do things simply because we enjoy them.

If someone loves baking, eventually somebody will suggest selling the cakes.

If someone enjoys painting, perhaps they should open an online shop.

If they love books, they could start reviewing them.

If they enjoy decorating their home, perhaps they should create content about it.

If they know a great deal about something, surely they should find a way to monetize that knowledge.

There is nothing wrong with doing any of those things. A beloved hobby can become meaningful work.

But it doesn't have to.

You can read fifty books and never review a single one.

You can bake beautiful cakes and give them to people you love.

You can learn about birds, history, old houses, flowers, films, theology, trains, pottery, or anything else simply because knowing about it makes your world more interesting.

You can be wonderfully mediocre at something and continue doing it anyway.

Not every interest needs an audience.

Not every talent needs an income attached to it.

Not every hour needs to produce something that can be measured.

Some things can belong entirely to you.

The Life That Happens in Between

We tend to divide our lives by the large things.

The year we graduated. The year we married. The year we moved. The year someone was born. The year someone died. The year we changed jobs or retired or finally took the trip we had talked about for years.

Those moments become the markers by which we remember time.

But there are thousands of days between them.

What happened on an ordinary Tuesday in August five years ago?

Most of us couldn't say.

We probably woke up, ate something, worried about something that eventually resolved itself, did whatever needed doing, and went to bed.

The day disappeared.

Thousands of our days will disappear like that.

That thought could make ordinary life seem insignificant. I think it does the opposite.

If most of our days will be ordinary, then learning to love ordinary days may be one of the most important things we ever do.

Not every day needs to become a memory.

It can simply be a good day.

A day when the coffee tasted especially nice. A day when rain tapped against the windows and we were glad to be inside. A day when dinner turned out well. A day when we heard from someone we love. A day when we laughed unexpectedly. A day when we climbed into clean sheets at night and felt grateful to be home.

None of it would make an impressive story.

It doesn't need to.

A Quiet Kind of Abundance

Scripture speaks often about faithfulness in small things.

I find that comforting.

God does not seem nearly as impressed by the things the world calls impressive as we are.

Jesus spent much of His earthly life among ordinary people doing ordinary things. Meals mattered. Hospitality mattered. Rest mattered. Conversations mattered. Children mattered. Bread mattered. The concerns of people whose names would never appear in history books mattered.

The smallness of a life has never made it invisible to God.

Maybe that can release us from some of our fear that we aren't doing enough.

A life can be quiet and still be full.

It can be rooted in one place and still contain wonder.

It can have routines and familiar rooms and repeated meals and people we have known for years and still be a life worth loving.

We don't have to collect experiences simply so that we can say we had them.

We don't have to keep proving that we are growing.

And we certainly don't have to apologize because the things that make us happiest look ordinary from the outside.

Loving What Is Already Here

I wonder how much of contentment begins with allowing ourselves to stop looking over the fence at the life we could be living.

There will always be another possibility.

Another road we could have taken.

Another place we could live.

Another version of ourselves we could become.

Some possibilities are worth pursuing. Sometimes we really do need to change something. Sometimes a dream keeps returning because it deserves our attention.

But we cannot live every possible life.

Eventually, we have to inhabit this one.

This home.

This season.

This collection of people and places and routines that make up the days we have actually been given.

Perhaps loving an ordinary life isn't a lack of imagination or ambition.

Perhaps it is a form of gratitude.

It is looking at a life that may never appear remarkable from the outside and recognizing that it contains things we once prayed for, things we would miss terribly if they disappeared, and things whose value cannot be measured by how impressive they look to anyone else.

The world will continue telling us to make our lives bigger.

There may be seasons when we should.

But bigger is not the only direction a life can grow.

It can grow deeper.

Kinder.

More attentive.

More peaceful.

More grateful.

More faithful.

And sometimes a life that looks very small from a distance is filled, quietly and completely, with everything that matters.

You are allowed to love that life.

Until next time,
Amy