Wednesday, April 16, 2008

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.

10 comments:

switch said...

Hardest of all when you KNOW that the ordinary is filled with possibilities...magic

andn if you could just allow yourself to feel it...

how is that done?

yes and even with pain and the weariness and that strange sweetness of listening to the same sad song on repeat.

I hear you, hopper.

BBC said...

To see a beautiful world I guess one would have to go into a forest and not be in contact with others and the news.

At least that is where I see a beautiful when I'm there.

BBC said...

When I pulled the lid off of the top of a tub of margarine the other day, there it sat in all its trust that there didn't need to be another seal over it to keep someone from tampering with it.

That trust, that to me is a beautiful world.

Anonymous said...

"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."
Thanks Hopper, I needed to be reminded of that.
(do we love them as they are, or as we wish them to be? Especially the lost ones?)

human being said...

The river is beautiful both in its murmuring serenity... and in its torrential floods... simply because it's moving...

Hopper, so nice you're sincerely talking about your emotions...

Just be...

Debra Kay said...

The universe is complete and whole
There is no loss
Only a redistribution of love
Sadness happens in the pause

Anonymous said...

Nothing can ever be taken to humans.
Neither its strength,Neither its weakness nor his heart.
And when they think Opening his arms
his shadow is like a crucifix
And when he believes taking
his happiness, it crushes it
His life is a strange and painful divorce

There is no love happy
extracted of a song, translated by me
frenchtony

Roxanne said...

these are good words, hopper, brimming with insight. nicely crafted and subtle ... well done.

Lynn Cohen said...

Yes, Happiness is a Choice! I chose Happiness several years ago when a relationship with some one close to me didn't seem able to heal. I stopped trying. I gave up and turned to "happiness, my own self made happiness, looking over my shoulder, wishing the other well, hoping he'd find his own happiness, and now it seems a wheel has turned and that mutual happiness is coming back my direction. Letting go. Letting go. It worked.

human being said...

just dropped in to see how you are doing dear friend...
may the same old breeze that comes your way touch you with a new hand...

be well...