This Ordinary Day

Have you guys heard of Thisordinaryday.com?

Oh ... you haven't?
Well. You're missing out. It's my new favorite blog.

This post is one of my favorites.

Straight from their site, here's what this blog is about:

This project came to mind after a particularly rough time. I was spending too much time out of the day focusing on the hard aspects of life. Mean people. Frustrating students. No coffee on days I desperately needed it. As often happens with things such as those, the attention I gave them only served to make all the bad worse and the good harder to see.

Then one day someone told me to stop. As simple as that, she said I needed to see my life for what it was, a compilation of a million moments - some of them hard and painful, but many more of them overwhelmingly wonderful. For the first time in a long time, I took good advice the first time I received it and I did stop. I stopped looking at the bad and I started searching for the good.

What I found was startling.

Not only were there shining moments of beauty and grace happening all around me, but there were also everyday moments of ordinary life that were wonderful all in their own right. When I took away the lens of the negative and forced myself to look at the positive, I found that there were far more things worth celebrating in the everyday than I had ever realized. What I took from all of this was that this is it.

The kids playing in the park.

The crossing guard who smiles at me every morning when I pull into school.

Even the sweaters my neighbor puts on his dog (as unfortunate as animals in clothes are).

This is what our world is made up of. These ordinary things. And if we’re willing to take the time to see it, we’ll realize that this ordinary day is wonderful because it’s simple and complicated, beautiful and mysterious and wholly ours.

Once I realized all of this, it seemed high time to share it. I gathered the best minds I knew of. Some I’ve known for the better part of 20 years (bad 1st grade haircuts and all) and some I’ve only been lucky enough to meet recently. But all of them make my world a better place. These are people who live hard, who challenge the ordinary, who comfort and share in ways I can only hope to be like when I’m living life as the best version of me.

I asked them to think about the ordinary and celebrate the extraordinary. I asked them to write it all down and share it with the world and have faith that putting those ideas out there would help to add to the good in this world and take away from the bad.

And they said yes.

So here it is. Our take on the ordinary. Six days a week (because everyone needs one day of rest) we’ll have one writer share one set of thoughts, inspiration and hope. We hope these words find you well and help to make you more aware, inspired and connected to the things unfolding around you. We hope you will come back each week and take part in this project with us.

But most importantly, we hope you are striving to see the wonder in this ordinary day.

You're welcome.