Thursday, March 10, 2011

The Magic of Ordinary Days *


 Most people recognize days that are extraordinary either in their goodness or equal awfulness. They stand out as amazing in their impact or depressing in their having been survived yet again. They are stamped in the memory…burned in the brain.

But, what about ordinary days?

You know…the ones where you get up and you feel Ok, havva cuppa, pet the dog, go to work and it’s…eh…neither good nor bad…just another work day. You come home, have supper, maybe watch the telly a bit and then toddle off to bed. Perhaps you went shopping, stopped at the library, had lunch with a friend or walked the dog after supper.

One of those days you’d note in your diary with nothing much more than “it was Wednesday and nothing bad happened.”

There is magic in those days…those moments of no particular import…magic in that they happen at all, let alone rather regularly if you look on a year’s worth of them. They flow one into the other until you glance backward and realize a number of them have gone by almost invisible in their having passed.

When Jim died I thought for certain that every day following “that” day would rotate in equal measures of pain, sorrow and disbelief. It was simply unimaginable that a day…a moment even…would disappear almost unnoticed…and that I would find comfort in the retrospect of it.

Truth is that an inordinate number had gone by before I noticed that I wasn’t immeasurably miserable every freaking day. To be sure, there were stand out days in which I felt, saw or touched life with a sense of I AM going to survive this and I WILL be happy again…eventually. But, the equal truth is that they were hard to come by in the beginning.

It is those unremarkable days that segue us from one day of import to another. It is the unnoticed days that allow us to draw in rest, relax and rejuvenate our hearts and souls. It is those ho-hum days that allow us to have special, memory invoking or making moments to savor at a later time.

Here’s to the magic of ordinary days.

* from the 2005 Hallmark movie of the same name.