An honor to live

Julia ♦ May 22, 2020 ♦ Leave a comment

To those who live and work nearby, Washington DC is ordinary and familiar. March 2013

“I am grateful for my daily life; it is an honor to live it.  My day-to-day routine holds many mysteries, even though it has become ordinary and comfortable to me.” 
— Steve Deger

No matter where we travel, Jeff and I always try to get off the tourist path for at least a few hours, and go where the locals go: the grocery stores and libraries and pubic transportation.  It’s a source of unending fascination to me that people in contrasting locations and circumstances live lives that are strikingly familiar in many ways.  How fun to imagine that people go about “normal” lives in places such as Paris, Bermuda, Alaska or the Caribbean.  Yet many might find my life, dividing my time between two very different sorts of homes, to be somewhat exotic as well.

I know I might get an argument here, but I think each of us lives an interesting life.  Even if there is nothing glamorous about one’s daily routine, it is completely unique, and that’s enough to make it interesting to me.  The masters of art and literature evidently agree with me, because most of the greatest works, though set in different eras and locations, illuminate the lives of everyday people.

The author Jan Karon has said that she writes “to celebrate the extraordinary beauty of ordinary lives.”  I love that thought.  I find that same beauty in the countless blogs I have seen, each with something unique to offer.  Today, I hope you will be able to recognize the poetry of your own existence, and treasure the honor of being able to live it.

This post was originally published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.