The Beauty in the Everyday

We were discussing, in book club last month, the everyday. Someone looked at me and said, "Well, I would say you are pretty everyday." Yes, I agreed, it's true. I am.

I am, in fact, ordinary in a family of extraordinary people. A sister and father who regularly appear in media thanks to their creative approaches and fertile minds for design. A mother who is extraordinary in ways that set her apart and spring from her own brilliance, though they are not celebrated. And me - ordinary.

The unusual is in fact much prized in our family. The phrase, "You're so predictable" was something of a taunt when I was young, though I never understood why. What was so wrong about that, I wondered.

Even my BioDad marches in his own one-man parade, living a different, slower, quieter kind of life even while the rush of a big city swirls around him.

And then there's me.

Every once in a while I feel it, keenly, mostly when my family come around. I feel how plain, how unexciting, how bound to the average path I am, my life is. i wonder what it would be like to be extraordinary for just a short time, but even in my daydreams, it is a short, bright thing, ending in coming home to the life I love, the life I have chosen.

The thing of it is that even while the extraordinary has, of course, a certain brash appeal, it doesn't hold me. The peacock is wildly showy, richly coloured, undeniably gorgeous. but the peacock makes me say, "Wow" and walk away, leaving the zoo and going back home. Instead, it is the sparrow who draws me in.

It is the sparrow, a small, boring brown bird, who makes me look closer, who hops up to catch crumbs that I drop to entice it so that I may study it further. It is the sparrow who, when you look closer, reveals not dull brown feathers, but richly complex patterns created by the overlayment of multiple feathers, speckles and bars melding into something muted, not drawing attention to its own beauty.

It is the sparrow who fills me with wonder, and makes me leave the neighbourhood cafe or park still marvelling and thinking about what I have seen, about how something so tiny can be so perfectly wrought, miniature feather by tiny bright eye.

It is the sparrow, the mouse, the housecat that make me study them more minutely and bring me closer than any other amazing, fantastical creatures do to contemplating creation and the divine.

So yes, I am ordinary. I am everyday. But mostly, other than the occasional longing for a brief moment of "Wow," I am okay with that, because I am someone who finds beauty in the everyday. A brown sparrow I may be, but I fly where I wish, unheeded. And that is perfect for me.