Extraordinary is simply ordinary with “extra” in front of it.
Those five little letters change everything!

On Friday evening my granddaughter, Lauren, started celebrating her eleventh birthday with eight of her best friends at a sleepover. My daughter, Sara, did a lot of planning, and it was a wonderful event with cake decorating contests, games, jumping on the trampoline, food and especially fun. Lauren’s friends are amazing young ladies—polite, caring, funny and high-energy. What could have been an ordinary day was turned into an extraordinary day with planning and love. 

At 1:41 am one of the girls yelled, “there’s a spider”, which woke up the few who were actually asleep and caused a frenzy of “aaah!!!s” through the house. Now, I recognize that some of you might be thinking, “how awful that those kids weren’t sound asleep at a decent hour”, or “I can’t believe there was a spider in the house” or “having a sleepover for eleven-year-old girls is just plain crazy”. But I, felt blessed. Ordinary became extraordinary.

When I think of a peaceful home—a peace-filled home—it isn’t necessarily one that’s quiet and serene (although that’s sometimes the case). It’s a home where there’s abundant joy, kindness, love, respect and concern for all who live there, or walk through the doors. Peace-Full living is different for each of us, and it changes as we move through the days of our lives—sometimes filling the need to be a place to hunker down and have complete solitude, occasionally being filled with people and raucous laughter, and often somewhere in between those two extremes.
Ordinary becomes extraordinary when we live with intention—choosing how to create our reality.

Looking back on the almost four decades I’ve been parenting, I’m aware of how we often assume permanence with our children—thinking that once we birth or adopt them into our lives, that they will always be there. We do the same with other people who are important to us. The truth is, we are all only on loan to one another for a brief time. We forget to pay attention to the blessed ebbs and flows of life. We miss the beautiful flowers that volunteered to be planted in the gardens of our lives, because the weeds are so much louder. As we live into the ordinary, we frequently miss the extraordinary. 

Sometimes we treat all of life with a single-minded purpose to achieve one particular goal.  That can be wonderful, of course, when you have an objective that requires diligence. The problem comes in when that one goal is fed at the detriment of all else in our lives. If we focus on one particular path of success for too long, and lose days that are saturated with moments of beauty, then what have we gained? When we get myopically caught up in the routine of our ordinary pursuit, we lose sight of the extraordinary happening all around us. 

Lauren is a flag waver for accepting all where they are, and finding good where others might not “see” it. She has friends as varied as the blooms in a greenhouse. She creates extraordinary by the way she treats those around her.

Ordinary can take over and insidiously rob you of an extraordinary life. Would you take a chance and take whatever’s ordinary and add a little extra to it—to take day-to-day experiences and shake them up?

Choose wonderful.
Choose to celebrate life whenever possible.
Choose optimism over pessimism.
Choose to be extraordinary.

I watch as a tiny bug lands on my book—its wings transparent, flapping easily in the stillness of a summer morning. A hummingbird hovers over a flower about six feet from me—the hummingbird I coaxed into my reality. I am blessed, I am whole, I am a traveler on a journey to figure out what my purpose is, and in those priceless moments I realize who I am.
Kay

©2016 peace full home™/intentional living

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Kay