A funny thing can happen when you spend a long time thinking about extraordinary lives.
You start expecting every day to justify itself.
Today should be productive. Meaningful. Profitable. Transformational. A little cinematic, preferably.
And if it isn’t?
Apparently the day has failed its performance review.
Well, perhaps tomorrow will finally be the day the soundtrack starts playing.
But I’ve been wondering about the Tuesdays.
Not the graduation. Not the launch. Not the day you hit some remarkable financial goal.
Just Tuesday.
A good cup of coffee. A laugh you weren’t expecting. Something interesting to read. A difficult thing accomplished. A little time outside. Work that felt like play for an hour.
Nothing especially newsworthy.
And no one is likely to make a documentary about the cup of coffee.
And yet, if a life is made of days, you’d think getting better at enjoying the ordinary ones might be a rather important skill.
That isn’t an argument against big dreams. I have plenty.
It’s an argument against spending thousands of perfectly available days waiting for permission to feel alive.
Perhaps the point of an extraordinary life is not to postpone the enjoyment of an ordinary one.
Because whatever remarkable day you’re planning for, there are an awful lot of Tuesdays between here and there.
I keep noticing versions of this idea in very different places: philosophy, work, psychology, even the strange little business of writing letters to people I haven’t met.
More on that sometime. Or maybe Tuesday.