A dark chill campervan morning. It’s been raining overnight, but nothing as I sit. The sounds are purely the falling of residual water and overhead planes, there flashing lights made ghostly by low lying cloud. Steam swirling skywards from the coffee cup and breathe on saturated chilled air. It seems quite bright, though the moon is in her final stages and there appears to be low heavy cloud cover. Trying to drag out the silences in between the passing of aeroplanes, the collective sounds of droplets. It’s early for a Self Care Sunday. The first signs of birdsong, a lone robin in the distance, plus a single crow. There is a chill, but it felt more prevalent last night than it does now, where the onset of winter felt very much at your heals. This morning not so much. The downside of living between two major international airports is the consistent early morning noise of its passing traffic. The roads are quiet, which is the blessing of an early morning. A day of catch ups with friends yesterday and grabbed moments of downtime between the various domestic necessities of life. As Maria Popova put them, the some what more ;
“ Mundane anchors of constancy by which we hang on to existence.”
It had me reflecting on these constant mundane anchors. Not that in there mundaness they are boring, more they are perhaps taken for granted, yet they are a vital part of our everyday life, the infrastructure upon which we are based, until they are gone. The routines of life that punctuate our days and weeks. The importance of the ordinary. As once quoted
“ True gratitude is about the ordinary.” Anton St Maarten.
The ordinary things that bind us together, support our lives and our creativity. They are not the mundaness of existence, they are the solid supports of experience and experiment. The breath of life. In his wonderful book ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ Mitch Alborn writes :
“ We’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?”
I am talking of the structure that allows you to ask questions like this and then head off in adventures. The celebration of the positive side of the mundane and the ordinary. Sometimes you just gotta stand back and see it. Self Care Sundays everyone, so do something for yourselves today. Lovely days people.
“ The word ‘mundane’ has come to mean ‘boring’ and ‘dull’, and it really shouldn’t - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes from the latin mundus, meaning ‘the world’. And the world is anything but dull: The world is wonderful.”
Richard Dawkins.
It’s too dark for a morning photo so here’s my fav from earlier in the week.
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