Ordinary
Things
“The
further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and
the extraordinary is waiting beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.”
Mark
Nepo (The Book of Awakening, p.24)
In his
book, Surviving Has Made Me Crazy, Mark Nepo reports advice from his spiritual
guide, “Enter into your own life.” He suggests that we spend the entirety of
our days here on earth on the edge of our lives, pondering and weighing them
instead of entering wholly into each day. I understand that. I find myself
being satisfied to just think about things, playing different scenarios in my
head, imagining that I might do this or that, go here or there, all while
sitting in my basement, sewing. On the one hand, that is because of a well-developed
imagination, for which I am grateful, however, some of it is laziness, and some
of it is fear. My basement is a safe place for me.
One
important step in entering fully into your own life is finding what gives you
joy. As Mark Nepo says, “I think happiness is overrated,” but joy is
essential. And “the key to joy is being easily pleased.” Take a minute
to think about that simple suggestion. The key to joy is being easy to please.
If you can find joy in the color of a flower, then how incredible it will be
for you to walk through a botanical garden. If you can add to that joy by watching
the clouds flow by, or listening to the birds singing, so much the better. I
wonder what excites you. Nepo says it is essential to “find that
vital element that brings us alive.” Because “joy in what we do is not
an added feature; it is a sign of deep health.”
Some of
us spend day in and day out in jobs we hate; feeling angry and depressed about
being there. Where’s the health in that? But many of us stay in those jobs
because we feel we must—other people are depending on us and our income. So, the
question then becomes, how can I enter into this job with joy? The answer is to
find something, even one thing you love—the people, the space, the walk to and
from, the window, the out of doors you pass through—just one thing you love,
and make that your focus. It’s the little things that give us joy, and pretty
soon we realize that the little things are actually the big things.
In the Bible,
joy is listed as a gift of the Spirit. When we are living within our calling,
i.e. entering deeply into our own life, we feel joy no matter where we are or
what we are doing. It is not the job that takes your joy away; it is failure to
dig deeply enough within to find the joy residing there, “quietly beneath
the skin of all that is ordinary.” It is a matter of adjusting our focus
and being easy to please. I hope your day is one joyful event after another.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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