Love the mundane

There's something that I personally feel is incredibly important and try to hold onto in life, a motto I'll occasionally remind myself: never lose your ability to be grateful.

Those who know me know that one of my favourite books (bizarrely) is Moneyball. One of the many parts I love from the baseball book talks about a pair of scenarios where a batter hits a ball towards a fielder. In the first, the ball goes straight to the fielder and in the second, the fielder dives to just barely catch the ball. However, in the first, the fielder noticed the hitter's movements before his swing and moved a couple of steps across to position himself perfectly to stop the ball and in the second, he didn't notice, reacted late and that's why he had to dive. On the surface, the second is more exciting but once you know the context, you realise things were so close to going wrong and that the first is more impressive and actually required more skill too.

I think that there is a lot in life much like that moment from the book – things that may not be exciting but are still brilliant.

We might not live in mansions but do live in perfectly nice homes. Our jobs might not always be exhilarating but can still be rewarding and fulfilling (plus, yay, you have a job). We may have great friends. We may live in relatively crime-free neighbourhoods. There is a lot of bad in this world that we are shielded from before it can affect us that we don't think about. Who knows all the bad things that are constantly being prevented?

I think sometimes we can get complacent, we can get disrupted by tiny waves and get annoyed by them instead of being grateful that they aren't bigger. We can look at what we don't have or have lost instead of what we still do have or how much more we could have lost.

Just because something isn't exciting, doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate it. There can be a lot more going on than we realise. Just because something looks unremarkable, doesn't it isn't remarkable. If someone makes something look easy, that usually takes a lot of skill and in fact, probably isn't easy.

So love the mundane because often behind the mundane something really good can be happening.

Posted on November 14, 2017 and filed under Life, Positive.