EVERYDAY

Everyday starts when we wake up.

It starts with expectations.
Expectations of what the day might bring, what we might accomplish, whom we might meet, what might go right, and perhaps what we secretly hope will go our way.

And then the day begins.

Somewhere between the first sip of tea and the last thought before sleep, something happens. We live it. We fill it with little routines, little dramas, little joys, little disappointments and countless moments that seem too ordinary to remember.

Yet these ordinary moments are life itself.

Everyday, every human being, in some form, wakes, breathes, eats, worries, laughs, walks, works, waits, remembers, forgets, loves and lives.

And perhaps that is the great wonder of an ordinary day.

Here are 50 things that happen to us, almost every day:

1. Everyday we wake up, sometimes eager, sometimes reluctant, sometimes grateful simply to see another morning.

2. Everyday we look at the time, as though the clock has the power to tell us how our day will unfold.

3. Everyday we reach for our phones, before the world has even properly reached us.

4. Everyday we think about what lies ahead, making plans for a day that has not yet happened.

5. Everyday we brush our teeth, performing a tiny ritual that has quietly followed us through life.

6. Everyday we drink something, tea, coffee, water, or whatever begins the machinery of our morning.

7. Everyday we eat, because however complicated life becomes, the body continues to ask for its share.

8. Everyday we look into a mirror, seeing a face that changes slowly enough for us not to notice.

9. Everyday we get dressed, choosing, consciously or otherwise, how we will present ourselves to the world.

10. Everyday we step outside, leaving behind the small universe of our home.

11. Everyday we encounter traffic, queues, signals, noise, impatience and people going somewhere just as urgently as we are.

12. Everyday we drive, walk, cycle or travel, moving physically while our minds travel through a hundred other places.

13. Everyday we meet people, some familiar, some forgotten almost as soon as they pass.

14. Everyday we exchange greetings, sometimes warmly, sometimes mechanically.

15. Everyday someone asks us, “How are you?”, and most of us answer with a version of “Fine,” regardless of the complicated truth inside.

16. Everyday we receive a phone call, a message, an email or a notification that briefly interrupts whatever world we are inhabiting.

17. Everyday we hear music, and sometimes a few notes can transport us instantly to another year, another place, another version of ourselves.

18. Everyday we work or study, contributing something, learning something, solving something or simply trying to get through what needs to be done.

19. Everyday we make decisions, some important, most ridiculously small.

20. Everyday we spend money, often without remembering where half of it went.

21. Everyday we worry about something, because the human mind has an extraordinary talent for inventing tomorrow's problems today.

22. Everyday we wait, for a person, a bus, a reply, a meeting, a result, an opportunity or simply for the day to move forward.

23. Everyday something doesn't go according to plan, reminding us that life never signed the itinerary we prepared for it.

24. Everyday we become irritated by something, and sometimes by someone who probably has no idea that they have ruined five minutes of our life.

25. Everyday we laugh, sometimes at something genuinely funny, sometimes at something completely absurd.

    

26. Everyday we talk, about important things, trivial things and things we will completely forget by tomorrow.

27. Everyday we listen, though not always as carefully as we imagine we do.

28. Everyday we judge something, a person, a situation, a decision, a restaurant, the weather or the driver who just cut across our lane.

29. Everyday we remember something, sometimes deliberately, sometimes because a smell, song, photograph or familiar place opens an unexpected door in memory.

30. Everyday we forget something, a name, a task, an appointment, a promise or where we kept the thing we were holding two minutes ago.

31. Everyday we experience a small moment of happiness, although we may not recognise it as happiness while it is happening.

32. Everyday we experience a small disappointment, and most of the time life simply asks us to carry on.

33. Everyday we see something beautiful, a sunset, a tree, a child's smile, rain on a window, food beautifully served or light falling differently across an ordinary street.

34. Everyday we complain, about the weather, prices, traffic, politics, work, people or the mysterious conspiracy of everything going wrong at once.

35. Everyday we compare, our lives with someone else's, forgetting that we are comparing our backstage with their carefully lit stage.

36. Everyday we dream, sometimes about enormous things and sometimes about something as simple as getting away for a few days.

37. Everyday we make small promises to ourselves, about tomorrow, next week, next month or the wonderfully imaginary “from Monday.”

38. Everyday we eat again, gathering around food not merely because we are hungry, but because food is one of humanity's oldest ways of gathering together.

39. Everyday afternoon arrives, bringing with it a slight slowing of the mind and the growing awareness that another day is already disappearing.

40. Everyday evening comes, and suddenly the urgency of the morning begins to loosen its grip.

41. Everyday we return home, physically or emotionally, seeking the familiar.

42. Everyday we talk to someone we love, or think about someone we cannot talk to anymore.

43. Everyday we look back at the day, consciously or unconsciously measuring what happened against what we had expected.

44. Everyday we realise that some things mattered less than we thought, while some tiny moment stays with us unexpectedly.

45. Everyday we eat dinner, another ordinary meal that may someday become an extraordinary memory.

46. Everyday we scroll through our phones, watching fragments of other people's lives while our own quietly passes beside us.

47. Everyday we make plans for tomorrow, because hope has a curious habit of expressing itself as a plan.

48. Everyday we switch off lights, close doors and slowly withdraw from the noise of the world, preparing to surrender another day.

49. Everyday we lie down, carrying unfinished conversations, unfinished work, unanswered questions and sometimes unfinished dreams into the darkness.

50. Everyday we fall asleep, trusting, without ceremony, that tomorrow will come.

And then it does. Another morning. Another beginning. Another set of expectations. Another day waiting to become something.

Perhaps this is what life really is. Not the extraordinary occasions we carefully photograph and preserve, but these 50 ordinary things repeated thousands of times until we suddenly realise that they were never ordinary at all.

The morning tea.
The familiar face.
The phone call.
The traffic light.
The shared meal.
The unexpected laugh.
The worry that disappeared.
The song that brought someone back.
The sunset we almost missed.
The person beside us when the day finally ended.

We spend so much of life waiting for something special to happen that we sometimes fail to notice that life is already happening.

Everyday begins with expectations.

But everyday ends with an experience.

And somewhere between the two, quietly and almost unnoticed, we become a little older, a little wiser, a little different.

That is the strange beauty of Everyday.

We think we are merely passing through another day.

In truth, another day is passing through us.

And perhaps the greatest secret of living is to notice it while it does.