an ordinary life

99% of life happens in the ordinary.

If someone had told me that at 16 (or perhaps they did and it didn't register in my teenage brain), my poor wanderlust heart would have begged to just let the sparrows take me. I had high expectations to move and shake the world, "make a difference", and believed that I would accomplish it all by the ripe old age of 25. I wanted to travel the globe, I wanted every day to be an exciting adventure of finding myself in new places and making my mark in history. I had no room to wonder about how to pay the bills or live in a routine. But as I found out, the truth is, life happens in the largely mundane, the ordinary. Occasionally, the ordinary is punctured by the earth shattering moments--marriage, birth of a child, divorce, loss of a loved one, a sudden tragedy--and temporarily thrown into chaos.

I just experienced one of those earth shattering moments myself when I married the love of my life a little under two weeks ago. The week of the wedding, while I was tying together those last minute details and excitedly preparing for our life together, I caught myself wondering what it would be like finally on the other side of all the chaos. Planning a wedding is a vacuum unto itself it seems, every normal thing seems warped around it. I wondered what it would be like in the every day, after we got back from the honeymoon and settled in--would I have some blues returning to normalcy? Would life be very boring after all the technicolor glory of our wedding and sweet romantic getaway?

As I sit here on our vintage green velvet couch, entangled next to my husband with a glass of wine reflecting on this first week of "ordinary", I can say perhaps in comparison, yes, and Glory to God. There's been a sweet peace about coming home and doing housework together, cooking instead of eating at fancy restaurants every night, watching the early seasons of Seinfeld, and just reveling in the ordinariness of it all. I know being cloaked in the magic of the honeymoon phase slightly paints life with a bit more novelty, but I digress. Even a world traveler has to sit in airports, wait for cabs, fill out boring paperwork, or wait in line to do laundry. Every aspect of life has these litanies of repetitive motion, of waiting, and of the dull.

These ordinary times are not just the drudgery in between life's earth shattering moments. Building these habits of being at peace in the regular is the essence of a full life and transforms the ordinary into something extraordinary. When I take the laundry basket out in the crisp January evening down to the communal laundry room to start a couple loads, I take a second to look around the small but tidy space, dimly lit by the dying sun. Doing laundry in and of itself is a chore, but in this moment I let the hum of gratitude fill the space. It feels good to separate out the loads, to toss the garments in the wash, and in a few hours, I get to use my hands to transform this mountain of fresh clothes into small, neatly folded piles and put them away. A moment of gratitude for clean clothes, a space to wash them, and being able to work with my hands turn a seemingly simple chore into a work of thanksgiving.

And it becomes extraordinary.