I’m learning how to embrace the more ordinary side of my life.
I recently came back home after a couple weeks on a big adventure out of the country. My favorite thing these days is when I get to see the kids again after being away for a little bit. Nothing like the colorful greetings that usually wait on the other side of my front door.
The next few days were part of a long weekend, which was especially welcome. I spent most of it deeply enjoying very ordinary things. Spending time with the kids in the pool. Restocking on groceries. Planning the week ahead on a spreadsheet. It was quite the contrast with the waterfall hikes and cave exploring I was up to earlier in the week, but I was loving it.
Re-entry after a big adventure used to feel more disorienting. I see these memes of people trying to recreate their European getaways by sitting outside of a coffee shop in an American suburb, only to find congested parking lots and scattered shopping carts in the background. That’s what coming back home used to feel like. The bigger the adventure, the bigger the come-down afterwards. Womp womp.
Coming home doesn’t feel like such a letdown anymore.
Some of it is acclimation. I’ve gone on enough adventures to understand that another one will come soon enough, and being home is a good chance to catch up on life until then.
But also, I’ve come to appreciate the ordinary side of my life a whole lot more. Dare I call it… the boring side.
I used to hate the idea of life being boring. The word didn’t feel strong enough to describe the emptiness of life without meaningful pursuits or a sense of purpose. And so I wanted to make sure my life was the opposite of boring.
Last year, though, I heard the term boring used in the most positive way I’ve ever heard.
I lost a family member to cancer, and at his memorial service, his wife shared that their marriage was “boring in the best way possible!” By this, she meant it was free of drama, steady, and always felt like a comforting and familiar sense of home.
As my own home life has taken off in the past few years, with three young kids, I’ve come to value balance a whole lot more. I’ll probably always have an appetite for adventure and wanderlust, but I’ve also started to value pairing that with an appreciation for the ordinary.
For a long time, I was all about unconventional living.
I devoured books and blogs written by people who did exactly that. A guy who gave up his career to ride his bike around the coastline of Africa. A guy who came up with a pretty good method to rapidly learn languages to travel around the world. Young people who left stable jobs to launch nonprofits in war zones.
And I always figured I’d end up doing something similar.
I went to a bunch of conferences that offered a closer look at how to overcome the things that usually get in the way of such a life. The necessity of money. The expectations of others. The trap of comfort.
Inspiring stuff!
From my vantage point, life throws you curveballs. Different people face different challenges in life, things that make their life “different than how it’s supposed to be.” For some it’s a diagnosis, for others it’s an early loss. All kinds of things. It makes you realize that there is no “normal” way to experience life.
If that’s gonna be the case, might as well try and make it “abnormal” in a positive way.
I started making some unconventional choices. Like:
Opting to couch surf my way through a semester of school instead of renting a place.
Taking on an odd internship of living in a van and speaking about North Korean human rights immediately after graduating.
Not waiting too long to start traveling with my kids, and taking them to Guatemala, the Philippines, and Portugal as toddlers.
And you know what? These ended up being great decisions!
During that semester of couch-surfing, I wound up becoming good friends with a girl who I’ve now been married to for ten years.
That odd internship gave me a taste for working in the nonprofit world and set the bar high. I’ve been working at nonprofits with a similar culture and heart for over a decade, loving what I do.
While traveling with babies wasn’t easy, traveling with my kids is relatively easy now thanks to their early experience. My five year old recently told me he wants to do an escape room in every country in the world, and so I love that a sense of adventure has been stoked. (If you know of any good escape rooms in Angola, help the kid out!)
All that to say, I value unconventional living. I think it’s good to question norms and expectations around how life is supposed to go.
But when doing things differently becomes your new normal, then question that too.
Several things in recent years have helped me learn how to appreciate ordinary life as much as the extraordinary experiences
Homestay tours
I have several bookmarked experiences where you can spend a night with a local family in a yurt in Mongolia, a Berber home in Mauritania, and so on. And I’ve already had plenty of opportunities to visit and spend time with people in rural villages, experiencing their daily activities.
While these are adventurous experiences to me, they represent people’s ordinary lives! To the Bangladeshi bricklayers I got to interview, they were just there for another day at work. The only weird thing was this guy from California who came by to chat in the middle of it.
It’s easy to romanticize ordinary when it isn’t your ordinary, but that just means that your ordinary is also fascinating to somebody else.
A health crisis
One thing that’ll quickly make you realize how good your ordinary life is are those times where you have it taken away from you.
I’ve had to endure a couple of health crises with my family, and while things resolved in a way I’m grateful for, those moments were full of so much uncertainty. Having to take care of kids on top of that makes it both physically and emotionally draining. You start to long for a simple day of being able to drop people off at school, go to work, and make dinner without worrying about test results.
That scene at the end of the movie Soul
Okay, skip ahead if you don’t want spoilers here, but Soul’s been out for years! Anyways.
By the end of the movie, Joe navigates a near-death experience to play his dream gig of accompanying a legendary jazz singer. However, in the quiet come-down after the experience, he realizes he was living along, through simple acts as he went about his day. He realizes that his “spark” of life wasn’t for this one special purpose of playing music, but the joy of living.
I loved that ending. Your passion, your pursuit, doesn’t have to be your purpose.
The sense that it’s those common things that bind us together
Just after college, I would alternate between stints of backpacking around the world and working odd jobs to afford those adventures. One of those odd jobs was being a substitute teacher, and I remember having to guide a class through an exercise in telling personal stories of things they experienced.
I realized that most stories I had from the previous summer spent in Europe might not relate to them too well. They might also come across as showy and unnecessary, so instead I told a story of trying to make a better grilled cheese. Pursuits often lead us to connect deeply with those we meet along the way, but it’s also good to note when they might actually create separation.
There’s the eccentric life, then there’s the examined life.
In the end, I think there’s still something wise in living outside the script of expectations. It’s a good thing to question what often gets taken for granted as the next logical step.
Whenever you face questions like:
What will I do after graduating?
What should we do with the kids when I go back to work?
How can I afford the trip of my dreams?
It helps to consider that the most ideal approach often isn’t the obvious one. Starting from a standpoint of openness to look at these crossroads from a whole bunch of different angles often leads you to doing things you end up really grateful for down the road. It’s been that way for me.
I think in the long run, I’ll still always have a natural inclination towards unconventional living, ambitious pursuits, and an eclectic mix of things I pursue. Much of this is just baked into the way I’m wired, and I appreciate that when you live this way, you wind up with good stories to tell.
But I’m also grateful that recent years have helped me better realize the value of the ordinary in-betweens. In the end, both ends of the spectrum are important. They both matter. You can miss out on life by living in a cocoon of familiarity, repetition, and routine, but you can also miss out on a large chunk by thinking that only the highlight reel is important. You really do need both ends.
I think the key to a richer life isn’t to have a more eccentric life. It’s to have a more deeply examined life.
When you question life’s norms and expectations, that’s one valuable examination. You often discover that a lot of the things we think of as necessary actually aren’t.
But when you keep examining, you might also start to discover that there’s a lot of good in life’s simpler corners. That fully embracing the ordinary days also makes a lot of sense. That these two opposites make each other more special.
Ordinary days can be amazing.