Suspicious of the Ordinary

Finding Love in Everyday Life 

There are ordinary moments of perfection, the sweetness of companionship, a comfort meal, a warm heart, where everything that has just transpired can be summed up in a word; delicious. 

Then there are other ordinary moments when I suddenly realize I’m  lost in thought instead of in the conversation. The other person has completely disappeared and my attention has shifted to my own internal commentary, where it becomes more important to prepare a response or mentally sort out something rather than attend to the other.  

These are the ordinary moments I am suspicious of because I am wondering if I am missing something important. I also ponder why there are so many ordinary moments. Could it be that Love is disguised as life? If this is true, if Love is hiding in the ordinary, then I need to pay more attention.

If this suspicion is correct, then I have even more reason to practice. These days practice feels like worship: a way of honoring what enlivens me, what exists beyond myself. Practice is varied and may include noticing my automated structure, meditating, visiting a counselor, or taking a pause before speaking. The form of the practice is secondary to the quality of heart that accompanies it. For me, that quality feels bent low, receptive enough to truly receive what is actually here.

And perhaps this is one of Love's great kindnesses: there is no shortage of opportunities to practice. Love shows up in an infinite number of ordinary ways, continually inviting me to notice, to become curious, to participate. This abundance is the fabric of life, and Love's deep care and concern is hidden in the ordinary. I don’t need to become someone different or reach an extraordinary state before Love meets me. As I learn to recognize and participate in such a Love, I am discovering that these ordinary invitations offer gifts I could not have anticipated: increased inner clarity and an enlargement of how I perceive the world.

Infinite Ordinary Invitations 

In honing my attention to the ordinary, it’s possible to see how much life I am missing. The fact is that the mind perceives the ordinary as something that is already known. How many times do I wake up, make coffee, go to work, answer emails, have conversations, prepare meals, drive somewhere, come home, do the dishes, and go to bed without much conscious thought involved? 

There is a cultural name for this activity; daily. The daily routine is so familiar that it feels ordinary, but these ordinary moments have a lot to offer. When running on autopilot I recognize Love’s invitation when the ordinary moment catches me off guard and I become annoyed. Like when I am in the middle of cooking dinner and the phone rings and the caller ID indicates it is a “must answer” call. 

I feel my body tense and notice that I am annoyed. In this ordinary moment I am being invited to practice by investigating why the interruption feels so bothersome. Why, when I say that relationship is a highly important thing, I am not living that truth? 

Love provides endless learning opportunities tucked in the ordinary stuff of our lives. Rarely is one experience enough to change a deeply established way of being. We need to encounter the same territory again and again to clearly see what we are up to. Learning a new way of being takes time, courage, and patience. 

Consider reading, fluency didn’t happen overnight, and it’s easy to forget how much learning was involved. There were sounds to learn and letters to recognize, and stringing letters into words and then words into sentences. At first there was much to pay attention to, and sounding a single letter or reading one word required all of my attention. 

But with practice the basics became familiar. Now there is instant word recognition, and I read through an entire page without consciously attending to the letters at all. The letters have not disappeared, I’ve simply learned them well enough that my attention is freed for something else. Now I can read for meaning, for the story, and for what the writer is actually saying.

Human maturation follows a similar arc, one small learning upon another until what required all my attention now becomes embodied. With a little suspicion I can detect Love’s activity in the ordinary as a gift. Ordinary moments are opportunities to see more deeply and more expansively. 

Clarity in The Ordinary 

A gift of ordinary moments is that they are small, and numerous enough to actually see what is happening in the interior structure.

For instance, I can be sitting in an ordinary conversation and suddenly realize that I have begun to make myself small, or that I am agreeing too quickly, or becoming overly interested in the other person's perspective while quietly setting my own aside. These are familiar interior movements for an Enneagram Nine, including the deeply ingrained habit of minimizing myself while enlarging the other. 

Nothing may seem to have changed from the outside, but from my interior stance something has become compressed. I am no longer meeting the person with me and instead have become occupied with managing the encounter. Another way I experience minimizing is a sense of less room; certainly less curiosity, and less possibility. The gift of such an ordinary moment is that practice brings clarity around this internal shift. 

The clarity reveals the minimizing encounter as two-dimensional; flat. This contrasts with a three-dimensional experience where the heart is open. The three-dimensional moment holds an alive potency where I feel more available. My heart is warmer, and my mind is clear. I am not necessarily more confident or certain. In fact, there may be less certainty because I am not determining in advance what the moment needs to be.

Three-dimensional does not mean the moment feels good, it can actually be quite uncomfortable, sad, or uncertain, but regardless of the content the three dimensions can be fully present to all that is happening. Come to find out, aliveness is not the same thing as pleasantness.

With ordinary moments I can learn and become clear about the subtle interior shifts. I can now notice subtle changes in my attention, body, and thoughts all tied to the minimizing efforts of my structure. What once seemed like one large pattern is now revealed in its individual movements.

The multitude of ordinary moments also brings clarity to something else; there is something larger than my structure going on here. It’s a paradox really, the ordinary is small enough for me to see what I am actually up to, but also spacious enough for me to discover endless possibilities. If my suspicion is correct, Love really is disguised as life and invites me to participate with an enlarged perspective.  

The Enlarged Ordinary 

Yes, the ordinary moments enlarge my perception of the world allowing the ordinary to become the extraordinary. 

Seeing more of reality is a precious gift which deepens practice and refines the capacity to see. The more I practice, the more my field of awareness seems to enlarge, and the more awareness enlarges the more I notice things that would have once passed me by. It seems the extraordinary is actually not as unusual as I once thought. 

An enlarged perception not only reveals the old stories and narratives that once piloted my life, but the heartbreak and promise of the outer reality of the world. This change in perception is where practice and the change in heart posture come into play. Watching an ordinary moment with an open heart means I can show up to the world with more of myself available. I can participate in a field large enough to hold both rapture and rupture without explaining either away.

The ordinary has taught me that when I am caught in my own structure I don't actually see the person in front of me. If I can shift to a wide open heart then I can see more of the other’s extraordinary nature. This shift would involve the practice of pausing and breathing into the moment. With a pause I can then notice a person expressing their particular way of being in the world. An enlarged perspective simply allows them to be who they are.

With an enlarged perspective I may also notice the extraordinariness of someone and their genuinely brilliant thought process. Or I may notice someone's laugh and realize how completely themselves they are in that moment. The ordinary really is quite delightful. 

The expansiveness shows up everywhere. The way light falls across a room, the taste of a summer peach, or the sound of birds outside my window. It  may be warm water on my hands, trees moving with the wind, or a familiar street on a particular day. None of these things in themselves are extraordinary, but the more attentive I become, the more expansive the ordinary becomes. It is simply filled with qualities I had overlooked. 

With more expansion the reality of the world can also hit squarely in the heart. The state of the world along with many people I talk with these days are sad, disheartened, and, frankly, scared. I also notice my own grief and fear, which becomes another place for practice. 

Maybe this is why I have become suspicious of the ordinary. There are simply too many invitations to assume that nothing is happening. The ordinary provides opportunity after opportunity to view my structure with more clarity, become more intimate with the person in front of me, and to discover the expansive beauty and aliveness that I once overlooked. I’m learning to bend low and receive what is here.

At this moment where might you be suspicious of the ordinary? With Love disguised as life, what invitation is present?