The Gift of Ordinary Days
Most days do not announce themselves as important. They begin with familiar things. Morning light comes through the same windows. Coffee gets made. Plants need checking. Something needs wiping up, putting away, watering, answering, or finding. Jeff is somewhere nearby, working or talking to me about whatever has caught his attention that morning. I move through the little routines that make our home ours.
Nothing remarkable. And that may be exactly what makes it remarkable.
I think we are naturally inclined to mark our lives by the big things: weddings, babies, new homes, graduations, trips, accomplishments, losses, beginnings and endings. We take photographs of those days. We remember their dates. But most of a life isn't lived there. Most of a life happens on Tuesday.
It happens when the strawberries need tending and I go out to see what they're doing. It happens when I check the rest of the plants, even though I already looked at them yesterday and will probably look at them again tomorrow. It happens when the robot vacuum trundles off to do its job while I do mine. It happens when Jeff says something that makes me laugh, or when we eat something particularly good and look at each other with that little oh, this turned out well satisfaction.
Most of a life happens on Tuesday.
Sometimes it is nothing more than the light falling beautifully across a room for no particular reason. A new leaf has appeared. Someone calls. The house is wonderfully quiet—or decidedly not. These are the ordinary days.
For much of my life, I think I treated ordinary days as the space between things. They were the days we crossed off on our way to something else. We wait for the weekend, the vacation, the garden to produce, the project to be finished, the weather to cool down, the house to be clean, the next season to begin. Then, one day, you begin to understand that all those days you were hurrying through were your life.
That realization doesn't make me sad. Quite the opposite. It makes me want to pay attention.
A Homestead Is Made of Ordinary Days
When people imagine a homestead, they often picture harvest baskets overflowing with vegetables, bread cooling on the counter, jars lined neatly on pantry shelves, perhaps chickens wandering picturesquely through the yard. Those things are lovely, but they aren't really the homestead.
The homestead is watering when nothing is ready to harvest. It's putting the tools back when the work is finished and checking the strawberries again. It's making supper, wiping the counter you wiped yesterday, noticing something needs doing and doing what you can. It is tending, and tending is rarely dramatic.
Perhaps that is why I love the idea of a homestead so much. At its best, it teaches us to stop measuring the value of a day by how impressive it was. A good day doesn't have to produce something you can photograph. Sometimes a good day is simply one in which the people you love are near, the work before you is manageable, and you have enough awareness to recognize that you are content.
The Things I Would Miss
Every now and then I think about the things I would miss if they suddenly disappeared. Oddly enough, my mind doesn't always go first to the things I would expect to miss. It goes to the little things.
I would miss the sound of Jeff moving around the house and the conversations that begin in one room and continue into another. I would miss looking out to see what is happening in the garden and the comfortable predictability of our routines. I would miss the particular way our home looks in the morning and the small surprises that interrupt an otherwise ordinary day—a flower opening, a good piece of mail, an unexpected visit, something ridiculous that makes us both laugh.
You don’t have to manufacture a beautiful life. Sometimes you simply have to notice the one you’re already living.
None of those things seems important enough to put on a calendar. Yet they are some of the things that make a life feel like home. Maybe gratitude begins when we stop requiring a moment to be extraordinary before we call it good.
We Don't Have to Make Every Moment Special
I don't want to turn ordinary life into another project. That's easy to do. We can become so determined to "live intentionally" that suddenly we're supposed to light a candle before breakfast, arrange our toast beautifully, journal about the sunrise, create a seasonal centerpiece, and feel appropriately grateful before 8:00 in the morning.
That sounds exhausting.
Ordinary days don't need improving before we are allowed to enjoy them. The coffee can just be coffee. The laundry can just be laundry. The garden can be a little unruly, and supper can be leftovers. You don't have to manufacture a beautiful life. Sometimes you simply have to notice the one you're already living.
Today Counts
I still look forward to things. I still make plans. I still have projects I want to finish and ideas I want to pursue. I still think about what we might grow, make, change, build, or learn next. Looking forward is part of the pleasure of being alive, but I don't want anticipation of tomorrow to steal today from me.
Because today counts, too.
This ordinary day counts, with its chores and conversations and half-finished projects. It counts even if nothing particularly exciting happens, the plants need checking, supper needs making, and someone forgets to put something away. It is a day when Jeff is here and I am here. It is a day when we have enough.
An ordinary day is not a day between important days. It is the important day.
I used to think gratitude came from having something wonderful happen. More and more, I think gratitude is what happens when we finally recognize how much wonder was hiding inside the ordinary.
Perhaps that is one of the quietest gifts of a homestead life. It teaches us to tend what is in front of us, love the people who are here, use what we have, and notice what is growing. It reminds us that an ordinary day is not merely a day between important days.
It is the important day.
Need a journal to write your ordinary days thoughts in? It’s available in my Etsy shop. Click on the image.
