Ordinary Life

It's hard some days to find meaning and see a beautiful world. You could amble through the city on weary feet with a weary heart listening to the same sad song on repeat. You could love someone who doesn't love you back and, no matter how much you tell yourself not to, you still see their face in the faces of strangers pushing past like a tempest among the buildings, pining away over old flames like a burnt out tree. But that's nothing more than ordinary life.

And you're stuck in the hustle of the rat race, trying to catch a rush hour train, when you trip and fall on the stairs. You're the prophet at the bottom selling sign language, begging for change. You're the people in the cafes talking about other people in other cafes and how so and so said what-not about who. You're the man clipping articles from the paper announcing the death toll, holding a placard saying, The end is near. All of us seemingly so alone -- all leaves on a tree, one by one falling away to the last end. It's hard to find beauty in it all. But that's just ordinary life too.

Ordinary like how everyone says they want peace, but it never comes. Ordinary to be too smart for your own good but too stupid for others. To tear people down and to diminish. To doubt and envy. To be strong and consistent and never be able to say, I don't know. To see all of life as just the everyday in the face of such mystery and coincidence. Ordinary as the lightening that there's no worldly explanation for.

But it's also ordinary to see that nothing joyful can come without some pain. To take time and step out of the death you're born into. To breath. To watch the moments pass by. To learn that the quietest word you can say in the language of the deaf is, Listen. To see that though we all meet our final ends alone everyone suffers that loss, even if the departed was unknown. When we realize there's two sides to every person: them as we wish them to be and them as they are, more than only the sum of some parts. And to remember that there's nothing I could do about lost love, that I couldn't have given you a reason to stay. That life is lovely. That happiness is a choice. That the world brims with possibilities and that ordinary is so much more than everyday.