How did the extraordinary become ordinary?
Stay woke
One of life’s greatest tricks is how quickly it convinces us that yesterday’s dream is today’s routine. Think about it for a moment…
There was probably a season when you prayed for the very things that now look to be in the background of your life. I’m talking about the job you once celebrated that has now become the place you complain about every Monday morning. The city you dreamed of living in has become the place where traffic tests both your patience and vocabulary. The home you worked so hard to own has become a running list of repairs, grocery shopping and wondering who finished the milk without replacing it.
Life has a remarkable way of turning milestones into maintenance.
That is not a sign that you chose the wrong dream. It is simply what happens when we live inside our blessings long enough. They become normal.
The Quiet Success of Adaptation
Human beings are wonderfully adaptable. It is one of the reasons we survive difficult seasons, adjust after disappointment, recover from heartbreak, rebuild after failure and somehow find our footing again.
The same gift, however, works in the opposite direction. We also adapt to joy, stability, abundance, and freedom so much so that what once made us pause with gratitude eventually becomes something we hardly notice.
There is nothing wrong with this. Imagine trying to experience the excitement of buying your first car every single morning for the next 10 years. Adaptation allows us to get on with life.
The danger comes when adaptation becomes indifference.
When We Stop Seeing Our Own Lives
I think adulthood makes us excellent managers and rather poor observers: We become remarkably efficient at organising calendars, paying bills, solving problems and planning the next stage of life. Then, somewhere in that efficiency, we gradually stop noticing the life we have already built.
We stop noticing the friend who always answers the phone. It is so easy not to recognise the colleague who quietly makes our work easier or the neighbour who waters the plants while we are away. I know I kept asking my son why his voice sounded different since last Christmas.
Even our own reflection can become so familiar that we fail to notice how much courage, wisdom and resilience now lives in the face looking back at us.
Life does not always disappear through loss. Sometimes, it disappears through familiarity.
The Dangerous Habit of Living Ahead
There is another habit many adults develop without realising it: We become experts at living in the next chapter.
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When this project finishes…
When the children grow up…
When the mortgage reduces…
When work settles down…
When I finally have more time…
The destination keeps moving, almost politely, just beyond our reach. It is rather like chasing the horizon. The closer you think you are getting, the more it quietly steps away.
Ambition is not the problem but living as though life begins after the next milestone might be. The irony is that one day we wake up to discover that the years we were rushing through were the very years we later describe as “the good old days.”
I can assure you that nobody plans for that sentence; it simply arrives on the proverbial Tuesday at 3:47pm.
Learning to Notice Again
I’ve discovered that recovering our ability to notice ordinary moments is where the magic lies: the uninterrupted conversation over breakfast, the day when nobody needed anything from me, or the familiar laugh that still makes me smile after 20 years. You know, the unexpected satisfaction of closing your laptop at the end of the day, knowing you did meaningful work without sacrificing yourself to achieve it.
None of these moments is worthy of applause, yet they ask for our attention. Now, I’ve come to suspect that maybe one of the purest forms of gratitude.
Living Awake
As children, we imagined adulthood as something that would arrive with pomp, applause and fanfare. For many of us, it did with a raucous 18th birthday party. The shock has been the deafening silence thereafter.
Now, as adults, we discover that it is mostly about noticing: Noticing who we are becoming, what no longer fits, the people who have quietly walked beside us and the ordinary moments that, stitched together over years, become a meaningful life.
Appreciation is another practice entirely. It asks us to resist the temptation to sleepwalk through the very life we once hoped for.
The Next Layer of Adulting
This is learning to remain awake within the extraordinary, because it rarely arrives under a spotlight. My invitation is to never become so busy planning the next chapter that you forget to read, with satisfaction, the one you are living.
