How can we add some extra into our ordinary in 2019? Poet Mary Oliver said, “No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.”
Carve out space in your day to cultivate the extraordinary. Meditate, read, and walk in the forest. It can be minutes rather than hours. Let your mind marinate all the golden nuggets of information it has collected and piece them together into something more. Something new. Something that will lead you down a different path. It doesn’t have to change everything. It can just change something. The way you are working on a specific project. The way you organize your home. The way you move through your days.
Oliver also said, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
Only you can breathe power and time into your ideas. Only you can decide what to focus on.
What ordinary things can you focus on today and turn them into something extraordinary?