The Pleasures of Being Ordinary

We’re all living these lives one moment after another.

How often do we hear the word “special” applied to other people?  And how often do we find ourselves wanting to stand out from the crowd?  Our Western culture extols the virtues of being extraordinary. “Let your greatness shine, live your best life.” From a young age, we are conditioned to believe that greatness lies beyond the realm of the ordinary—that to be truly fulfilled, we have to be exceptional. 

Nobody in the United States of America in 2024 aspires to be ordinary. We are led to think that being average is the most dreaded thing imaginable. I recently learned that in Sweden, school children are told to aspire to be average. And I thought, that would never happen in the US. Yet Scandinavia emerges in every survey as the happiest place on earth.  In our relentless pursuit of the extraordinary, we often overlook the inherent beauty and richness of the everyday.

Many Zen stories deal with this yearning.  There’s the story of the young monk who asks the master, "What is the Way?" He’s asking, how can I find enlightenment, true fulfillment? And the master offers a seemingly paradoxical response: "Ordinary mind is the Way." This deceptively simple answer challenges our deeply ingrained notions of what we should strive for.

When I first started practicing Zen meditation, I was yearning to escape the confines of my ordinary life. And besides not wanting to be ordinary, there were things about myself that I wanted to get away from. My anxiety, my anger, my jealousy, my you-name-it. I was trying to get away from my ordinary mind, to find some other mind. But of course, wherever I went, my ordinary mind went with me.

When I met my first Zen teacher, I was underwhelmed. He looked like one of the most ordinary human beings on the planet. I met him in his office one morning, and the first thing I noticed was that his shirt was buttoned wrong. He seemed to have no awareness that his buttons were all askew, and if he’d known, he wouldn't have cared. He simply plopped himself down in an old chair and talked about practicing “scruffy Zen.” This was not what I thought I wanted in a teacher, but as we sometimes say, things can be opaque to the mind and radiant to the heart. Something told me I could learn from this ordinary, down-to-earth, unpretentious person. His unassuming demeanor belied a profound wisdom, and his simplicity and humility challenged my deeply ingrained notions of what it means to be special. In his presence, I began to see that contentment isn't found in special experiences, but in the quiet acceptance of the ordinary.

In my research on thousands of people living their ordinary lives, we find that facing toward the messiness, the ordinariness, and the difficult parts of life actually brings relief as we stop working so hard to be someone different. The path to sustained contentment is simply to be with the ordinary.

Think about your own experience.  Is there a place or an activity where you don’t think about yourself, where you’re not evaluating how you’re doing.  You’re just fully present in the experience.  And is there some relief connected with that?  Some peace?  Most of us have that kind of “happy place” that’s beyond judgment.

Yet because we face so many daily challenges, many of us yearn to find someone who seems to have life all figured out – someone we can follow who isn’t ordinary.  And sometimes when I talk as a Zen teacher about my own mundane experience of living, people express their disappointment. "Wait, no, not you! You don't have a messy mind. You don't wake up some mornings feeling confused and unsure of what you want." We’re eager to find somebody who's figured it out, somebody who's reached that place where no one is in pain, where no one is confused. Nobody wants to find out that we're all here living ordinary lives that include sickness and aging and eventually, death.  At the same time. we know it's the truth. And anyone who tries to tell us it's not the truth is selling snake oil.

Appreciating the ordinary makes life come more alive, makes it “pop.” It might be listening to that favorite song as if you were hearing it for the first time, watching the sun filter through the leaves on a tree, looking across the table at your partner and realizing how astonishing it is that you’re together with this person.  It's about recognizing that enlightenment isn't some distant goal to be attained, but a present reality to be embraced in each moment.

The ordinary includes moments of clarity and moments of confusion, moments of joy and moments of sorrow. And through it all, there’s solace in the simple truth that we're not alone, that we’re all living these lives one moment after another.

Being ordinary can include working hard on things that are meaningful, things that give us satisfaction. Whether the world recognizes our work as special is often a matter of chance, something we can’t control.  Our happiest moments may, in fact, be the ones when concerns about being special don’t cloud our minds, and we can see the extraordinary aliveness of what’s right in front of us.

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