Being unremarkable is often seen as a sign of moral failure – yet finding joy in the everyday can lead to a mindful, luminous experience
Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life
Lately I’ve been playing with a thought experiment: what if I was told the rest of my life would be completely ordinary? Not bad, just unremarkable.
My immediate response is, “Well, ordinary is better than awful” (forever the optimist), and then almost immediately (and embarrassingly), “This is not how life is meant to play out! I want something more!”
These questions came to me as I read Barry Magid’s book Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, a provocative reflection on Zen and psychoanalysis that upends some of the more infantile, and yet very natural, fantasies we smuggle into spiritual practice – and into life itself.
