falling in love with ordinariness

Trying to be grateful for what one has is not as easy, breezy or cheesy as it sounds in new age books or podcasts. It's actually incredibly confronting.

All around us we are being bombarded by information that tells us to consume. Consume and then consume more. Even when you are consuming, think about what you will consume next. How can the next thing you consume be even better or more special than the current thing you are consuming?
Stepping off this merry-go-round of "endless consuming to feel better" is an interesting experiment.

When we become content with "enough" - we take our eyes away from our "dream situation." Suddenly, the present moment seeps into our lives. The present moment is a pretty confronting thing. When we aren't dreaming up some new way to escape it even more lavishly, in the future... we are faced with our everyday ordinariness.

Accepting that you are ordinary, in a world that tells you being ordinary and unremarkable is a failure and pointless, challenges the narrative we tell about what matters in our lives.

When we ran out of building money... suddenly everything changed. The ability to spend money on things we liked vanished. Suddenly the amount of money coming into our household looked terrifyingly small. No more just popping into town for a coffee and a muffin. That money could buy 3 meals worth of potatoes. That money could buy several kilos of rice. That money could put petrol in the car.
I know it might sound weird, but suddenly we could only see what we couldn't do. We could only see how we lacked abundance. We were broke and we talked like we were broke.

After the massively exhausting process of renovating a house and jumping through many many bureaucratic hoops to do so, we didn't feel successful. We had planned on growing more food by that time, we had given up setting up garden beds after we discovered DDT and lead in our soil. We had watched the fruit trees we planted get attacked by possums and dug up to build leach drains. We had lost sight of why we were doing what we were doing. There have been days, weeks even during this great homesteading adventure when we woke up with a heaviness in our chests. Depression has been a regular visitor in our home over the past few years.
She has coiled around our bed like a cold wisp of smoke, she has grown thick and heavy and some days she has caught in our throats and threatened to suffocate us.

She may yet return, but now we have a secret weapon. The joy in ordinary things. We have found that when you allow yourself you can feel excited about the completely mundane your potential for living a joyful, abundant life expands significantly. Thousands of daily little excitements are far more achievable for the average person than regular extreme joys and excitements, brought on by mass extravagance. The joy of having an extra dried prune plum (especially when we dehydrated them yourself, with fruit from your friend's tree) has a lovely feeling of naughty decadence. The anticipation of waiting for your favourite potato bake to finish cooking is a delightful feeling that can make one feel very abundant indeed. I can personally attest to the fact that pulling up potato plants and discovering a mother lode of potatoes is an incredibly fulfilling and exciting experience... usually followed by the equally fulfilling experience of aforementioned potato bake.

Let's be perfectly honest, in our attempts to create extraordinary lives we are destroying the ecosystems we rely on to survive. We are causing massive environmental issues and our children will have to deal with the extraordinary consequences. I don't want that to be my extraordinary legacy. I'd rather live an ordinary, low carbon, low waste life and leave our children the opportunity to do the same.

Underneath it all, most people list off very ordinary priorities in their lives: family togetherness, financial security, personal safety, love, happiness, community... you know the drill. And yet, somehow woven into this list of what matters in life is an idea of what we do needing to be better than others. I've seen parents in parenting forums tearing each other down, diminishing the value of the parenting of others, in the name of "educating" or helping... blinded by their own righteousness and desire to be a "good parent." I've seen people spend their lives working jobs they hate to occasionally go on extravagant holidays. I've personally sought the approval of others in validating my own writing and work, as if popularity is the ultimate measure of whether or not I can enjoy doing something.
 Our desire to be extraordinary and special is a strange cultural narrative that is robbing us of everyday joys. When I seek others' approval and celebration of my writing, rather than simply being joyful because I enjoyed writing, do I rob myself of the joy of the process? When I fixate on an extravagant holiday justifying an unstimulating working life, do I rob myself of day to day joy in the name of occasional and rare dopamine injections to keep me sane? What joys are we losing in the name of being special?

What do we lose in taking a deep breath and finding joy in ordinary things?

I do not say this because I am a smug motherfucker who knows it all. Honestly, I'm not even that smug. I'm just someone who has come out of a very dark hole of anxiety and self consciousness that I tried to fix with buying all the nice things and felt compelled to share. I also think we kind of need to realise how little we need to survive, and even thrive. And yet, how tenuous our access to these basic needs can become, quickly (because we took our eyes off the ball, distracted by the shiny newness of all the things we could consumer if we had more money.)

Why is all this reflection relevant in time like this? When chaos feels like it is just around the corner? As economies threaten to collapse and corona virus threatens?
It's relevant because we need to address what matters in our lives.
Events like this are reminders to us that perhaps where we, as a nation and individuals, have been focusing our energy has been misguided. 
   We know that our endless consuming is destroying the planet. Most of us know that we rely too heavily on centralized systems (like the economy, centralised food distribution and fossil fuel focused energy industry) for our basic needs, but we haven't know what to do about it. We haven't had the time or energy to focus on a new way of doing things because we are so busy. Busy doing jobs, paying rent, making ends meet and saving for holidays (or not, some people can't afford holidays). Meanwhile, this great machine of humankind is rumbling towards creating its own demise. And we are getting close to the edge of a cliff. This time of panic and chaos is an excellent time for us to slow the fuck down. It's an opportunity for us to reflect on how we got to a point where our global economy and national economies are so fragile that a virus could crash them.
What do we really want from this life?
What do we really need to be happy?
What do we need to thrive?
These are the key questions that should shape our actions in life.

NB
Many of the ideas above were distilled for me in The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary by Catherine Gray. While some of the ideas here are paraphrased from her sentiments, the ideas themselves were something I was already grappling with when I read her work, which is why it resonated with me so strongly.