The Beautiful Ordinary

I have a theory that we miss most of our lives. Not through negligence exactly, but through the habituated gaze — the way we stop seeing what we see every day because the eye is efficient and the brain is lazy and familiarity is its own kind of blindness.

The woman who lives beside the sea no longer sees it. The man whose window faces mountains has stopped noticing them. And most of us, most of the time, have stopped noticing the extraordinary ordinary miracle that is simply being alive on a Thursday afternoon in a body that breathes without being told to, in a world that turns without our assistance, under a sky that does not require our appreciation to be beautiful.

Elijah heard God in the still small voice — not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire. In the whisper. Which means Elijah had to be quiet enough, attentive enough, to hear it.

Attention is the beginning of reverence. When we truly look at something — a face, a flower, a passage of Scripture we have read a hundred times — we create the conditions for wonder. And wonder is close kin to worship.

Pay attention today. That is the whole practice. Pay attention, and let what you see teach you something about the One who made it.