In Praise of Ordinary Days

I was at a family gathering the other day, talking with one of my cousins. Late in the afternoon, as the conversation slowed and everyone settled into that comfortable mode that families sometimes share, I found myself saying something that I had been mulling over for a while.

“I’ve come to appreciate ordinary days.”

Not the remarkable ones. Not the days filled with adventure, achievement or celebration. Just the ordinary ones.

The days where your routine quietly unfolds. You wake without much enthusiasm, make a cup of tea, lose your keys and frantically retrace your steps trying to find them, put the bins out, make a task list, nod to a neighbour, walk the dog, maybe read a few pages of a book and let your mind wander between memories, plans and daydreams.

Because I’ve come to realise—as Freddie Mercury so aptly put it — these are the days of our lives. This is what the vast majority of our lives is made up of.

Most of our lives are not made of milestones. They’re made up of repetitive and uneventful small actions. Of washing-up, shopping lists, familiar streets, favourite mugs, and the same people appearing in the same places. We spend so much time waiting for life to begin that we overlook the fact that this is life.

It’s tempting to think happiness lies elsewhere. We tell ourselves we’ll be content after the promotion, the move, the relationship, the holiday, the next chapter. Or we drift backwards, replaying happier memories as though life reached its peak somewhere behind us.

Meanwhile, the ordinary day slips quietly past, unnoticed. Nothing particularly bad happened and nothing particularly good.

Yet anyone who has lived through illness, grief, heartbreak or loss knows something important.

When life falls apart, you don’t dream of extraordinary days. You dream of ordinary ones.

I don’t have a great memory for my childhood but one memory stands out like it was yesterday. I was thirteen when my father passed away after an accident at work. In the weeks after, my family tried to resume our routine. I remember sitting down after dinner and the six o’clock news came on. I was watching the newsreader, thinking, How can you just keep talking as if nothing’s happened? Don’t you know my dad has gone? Why is the world pretending to be the same when it’s been turned upside down?

I wished I could go back to the days just before he died, when the world was just how it always was, on an ordinary day when he was still here. Perhaps sleeping in his favourite armchair on a Sunday afternoon, a wee dram of whiskey in a tiny tumbler by his side. The tumbler I still have to this day.

For someone who spent the last few years making their life a little bit more extraordinary, I am finding myself appreciating the ordinary in a way that I never expected to.

Because I know that one day I’ll look back and wish I could have just one more ordinary day. A day where I could walk without an ache, hear the kettle boil from another room, listen to the laughter (or arguments) of my grandchildren in the house, or scratch behind my dog’s ears as I walk into the garden to cut the grass.

Today is an ordinary day. And I am very grateful for it.