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6:34:00 PM EDT
Hearing Beautiful Day -- U2
Beautiful Ordinary Day
This 9/11 is like that 9/11 in a lot of ways. Like that one, where I live, this one has been a beautiful day -- the sort of cloudless late summer/early fall day in which the sky cracks open your heart with its endless blue and you just sort of gape at how much you just want to jump into it and keep going through it until it fades into purple-black and you can see the stars.
Framed inside this breathless blue sky, however, was an ordinary day. I worked on the computer. I spoke to my wife and friends about inconsequentialities. The big news today: My daughter is off to her first swimming lesson. The UPS guy showed up with a big bag of really awful DVDs someone wants me to review (not likely) and a couple of good CDs, also for me to review (more likely). My book publisher's publicist called and told me I had an interview with a radio station on Friday. I rewrote a financial brochure for a client. I ate two microwaved soft pretzels for lunch. I got the mail. I played with my cats and dog. I updated my AOL Journal. I had a day like other days. A beautiful day with gorgeous blue skies, but an ordinary day nevertheless.
When you're younger, you yearn for the extraordinary because you don't understand the value of the ordinary, of days when all you do is live and spend your time with those you love and eat and sleep and have the horizon of your consciousness end at the line of your lawn. Then the extraordinary happens and you understand, and every ordinary day you have after that you have a moment -- sometimes just a second or even a flash -- where you thank whoever or whatever you might believe in that today was an ordinary day.
We live in extraordinary times, and we are not beyond them yet. Other generations in other times have had their extraordinary times or will have them to come. These times call us to do more than we thought we could and we find a way to do them, to fill our days again with the ordinary, which we value, as they say, at a price beyond rubies. In these extraordinary times, two years on from an extraordinary day, I had a beautiful, ordinary day, with a bottomless blue sky.
I do not take it lightly. I am glad for it. I hope for many more ordinary days to come.
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THAT WAS VEREY BEAUTIFUL. I MYSELF REALLY APPRECIATE EVEN THE VEREY MUNDANE MOMENTS IN LIFE AS LONG AS THERE WITH MY FAMILY.
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that was my brother's birthday and he will never forget it as long as he live and that was such a sad cay for every one it hurt a lot of ppl to see that happen it should have never happened at all.
1/29/05 2:54 PM