The beautiful ordinary

Seeking beauty, resisting less and enjoying life more in all its wonderful ordinariness.

The beautiful ordinary was an idea that came to me in one of the hardest periods of my life. I was living with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); existing in a constant state of anxiety and dread which would culminate in at least one panic attack every day.

I had to be held to fall asleep, or wait until I was completely exhausted by the early hours of the morning. I couldn’t concentrate for a whole work day, and even small things would send my body into a state of panic.

The one saving grace of anxiety is that our body can’t sustain a state of constant panic: it will eventually regulate or exhaust itself, so the static dies down after a while (before starting up again later). These moments of peace are some of the most blissful I have ever experienced. Small beauties are magnified, and the pleasure they produce is more acute: a new flower blooming, cool breeze on your face, bird song, a hot cup of tea.

It was in one of these moments that those words walked into my head: this is the beautiful ordinary.

And I knew, that somewhere in that idea, was the secret of a contented life. If we could only grasp it and hold on, then when the worst of the storm passed, we’d be okay.

It’s many years later and I feel I am only just beginning to figure out how. I miss the mark most of the time.

One other blessing of that time, that diagnosis, was that it forced me to get some serious help. And in doing so, I dug deeper into all the layers below and found fossilised remains of emotions and experiences I’d buried without resolve. It’s been a long and hard road - one, no doubt, I will walk for the rest of my life. But with some excellent help along the way, many books read, many journals scrawled through, many hours (and let’s face it dollars) spent on psychology sessions, I feel like I’m getting somewhere; getting closer to living in the beautiful ordinary.

Having thoroughly excavated my mind, body and soul, the next frontier is acceptance. This can be the ironic thing about therapy: many of us who are perfectionists go because we know we need “fixing” - and we think a day will arrive when we no longer feel sad, anxious, and uncomfortable, having conquered the lesser parts of ourselves. The difficult truth is that the destination is acceptance - and it isn’t even a destination, but a path we will try to walk and often stray from for the rest of our lives.

Once I accepted this, I then put my perfectionistic overachieving tendencies to work: must accept at all costs / I will accept better than anyone has accepted ever before.

But as my Headspace app helpfully pointed out to me, trying harder to accept can often make things worse. Instead, a better way to think about things is to “resist less”.

In resisting less the goal is to let go. Once we let go we can sink into and move with the ebbs and flows, squeezes, punches, sensations, pains and joys of one moment, day or season to the next. It’s like letting the waves on the beach wash over us rather than trying to stand fast against them or even duck under the wave as I am prone to do. Or, to employ another simile, it’s like learning to move with the rock of a boat rather than falling over constantly in our attempt to pretend we can walk and balance as if we’re still on land.

As I practice moving with the waves or the boat, I’ve felt a strong pull back to the pen and the keyboard - something I haven’t felt for quite some time. I’m still processing and exploring what all of this means and how it works, but I think this pull to write means I have the ingredients, I just have to try and fail a million times to make the perfect jam sponge cake.

I’m also fascinated in how these ideas of accepting and resisting less can impact all parts of life from big to small. How could it make someone a better (or at least happier) home cook, hobbyist, haemotogloist, helicopter pilot? (Forgive me, the alliteration went too far - but you get the idea.) Perhaps I won’t get that far, but who knows.

The Beautiful Ordinary is me picking up a thread, tugging it, and seeing where it goes.

It is me seeking beauty, resisting less and enjoying life more in all its wonderful ordinariness.