Ordinary Life or Extraordinary Life?

I heard American author Elizabeth Gilbert say in a 2017 interview,

about a decade after writing one of the most well known (if not the most well-known) travel books by a woman or a man, that most activities in our lives are probably 90% boring.

Which is to say, mundane, repetitive, predictable, and quite ordinary.

We brush our teeth, fill the coffee maker, commute to work, tell our children to wash their hands and put on their bike helmets.  We sit in meetings at work, pay the electric bill online, and lock our cars.

We do these things again.  And again.  And again.   There’s that 90%.

But then I think about the other 10%.

This morning, as I put my 4 year-old daughter into her car seat before the sun had risen, I briefly closed my eyes and pressed my forehead gently against her forehead.

As I felt the heat of her skin on mine, and the curls of her light brown hair lightly touching my face, my heart spontaneously contracted, and my love for her felt wider than the entire universe.

And in that moment, I realized, we do these things too.  Over and over again.  And that’s the 10% extraordinary in our lives.

In American poet Mary Oliver’s

2004 book, Why I Wake Early, she writes in her poem “Mindful”:

Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less
kills me with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for-
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world-
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.

You see, it is not until we zoom in to the very moment of our lives in the very moment that we are living it, like a telephoto lens of a camera, that we fully experience the extraordinary of life.

And yet, now here comes the paradox, it is only when we do this, when we practice living one-mindfully, that we realize that the other 90% which is undeniably mundane, repetitive, predictable, and ordinary, is actually extraordinary too.

Perhaps that is why Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung

famously wrote:

Only a paradox comes close to comprehending the fullness of life.

Or why American poet Walt Whitman

declared in Song of Myself:

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes.

Ordinary and extraordinary. There is truth in both.

I will close with another poem entitled “This World” from Ms. Oliver’s same book Why I Wake Early, in which she writes:

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open
and becomes a star.

So maybe, come to think of it, perhaps there is no 90% ordinary and 10% extraordinary because in the end, or maybe it's actually in the beginning, it is all just one.