Ordinary Days

A large part of the past year has been very much dominated by my business life. I have been consumed by the demands of establishing objectives and goals, gathering and analyzing data, responding to questions, and reviewing legal documents. Vacations had been canceled, or deferred, and too frequently I ended up spending the night near the office, unable to face the long commute home in the evening, only to retrace my steps early the following morning. Even on weekends, documents had to be prepared, or reviewed, and often there were conference calls with other members of our management team and outside counsel or other advisers. And with all that, just over a month ago we saw all that we had done and all that we had hoped to achieve had ended in disappointment, even despair, leaving us no closer to achieving our goals than we had been a year ago. But today, I am happy. What is different is my attitude and my focus, both of which recently have been centered on home and family.

There is a prayer I like that says: "Oh ordinary day, let me be grateful for the treasure that you are". It's the antithesis of the attitude that responds to the common question of: "What's new?" with the threadbare canned reply: "Nothing, just the same old, same old." Maybe it's getting older, at least in part, that heightens my appreciation for the daily ordinary. With each passing year we see another of our contemporaries suddenly facing a precipitous decline in their health, leaving them forever changed, impaired, diminished. It's easy to imagine how they would cherish the ability to set back the clock of their lives to an ordinary day, one just like all the others when they were healthy, and whole, and happy. So much of this is trite, old news. Forty years ago, Joni Mitchell lamented with us: "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?" And yet, for me at least, it is precisely because an idea is trite, an old saw, even obvious and banal, that I usually need to be reminded of the simple truth that it contains, the essential life lesson that deserves a larger part of my daily attention. That's the path to wisdom, and serenity.

The singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer to me seems to possess a gift for elevating out of the myriad ordinary elements and experiences of our often too busy days those persons and moments that hint at transcendence, or even that give evidence of the sacred in our lives, and to bring them into attention in ways that sometimes elicit a chuckle, and other times a gasp. With an outlook that refuses to consider anyone unimportant, any experience unworthy of reflection, in simple, everyday language she provokes me to consider the many ways in which each day is suffused with spirituality, yes even with the Spirit of God. Her music inspires and unsettles; it is a cause for joy, and a reminder to do better, to pay closer attention. Listening to the message of her songs is a comforting reassurance, as well as a lesson in how much of the content and message of each day I miss by failing to pay attention and to savor the treasure of that ordinary day.

Later this year, Carrie is going to be at a retreat center in the Pocono Mountains where she'll be leading a seminar on the topic: "Writing Mindfully: Exploring the Sacred Ordinary." It's billed to be pitched to "songwriters, poetry and prose writers of all experience levels…", and I certainly hope that is true, particularly the "all experience levels" part. I'm going to attend that weekend, and we'll see if the prose of an aging lawyer is malleable enough to learn to grapple with the sacred ordinary. I hope so. In a way that's what I hoped to find a way to do each time I've started a journal or a blog entry - to use the medium of writing to organize my thinking, to examine my experience, and, perhaps, in so doing, better to understand both the experience and the writer. We shall see. I'm guessing that if anyone can help make that happen, Carrie Newcomer is the gal to do it. Stay tuned, see what happens, even comment if you like. It's a process, a journey, an evolution, and every insight is worth considering. See, I'm learning already.

There is an instinct in us for newness for renewal,
for a liberation of creative power.
We seek to awaken in ourselves
a force that really changes our life from within.
And yet this same instinct tell us
That this change is a recovery of that which is deepest,
most original, most personal in ourselves.

–Thomas Merton