Dailiness

The school year is ending.  My family’s daily routine is going to change.  And we are glad for it.  I will dot our family calendar with the beach, swimming pool and birthday parties.  But even summer will become its own kind of ordinary.  

   

Merriam-Webster online defined dailiness as “daily or routine quality; ordinariness” and provided the example phrase the dailiness of family life.  I found their explanatory phrase amusing because that is precisely what I’m pondering today!  

The getting up, the eating, the dressing, the showering, the driving, the arriving, the wondering if we’re thriving amidst the routine.  I’m thinking, “Isn’t that the goal, thriving within ordinary?  Finding joy and meaning in the daily activities of life?”  We may be on holiday maybe twenty days of the year sprinkled between 345 days when we are not on a special trip or doing a once in a lifetime thing.  And those unusual experiences, trips to the Grand Canyon or Disney or a cruise, visits to far away Grandparents or New York City or a parade, are high point happenings for sure but they are not what we do most of the time.  

It’s the daily routine that can weigh us down with boredom, make us wonder what is the point of reading bedtime books night after night, putting games neatly where they belong, or reminding of the same things every day, “brush your teeth, don’t forget your lunchbox, tie your shoes.”  Can there be fulfillment in the ordinariness? 

I’m working toward “yes.”  Letting go of wanting it to be perfect is a start.  Analyzing the difference between the high spots of intensely happy moments and the gift of merely being a level type of content is another step.  I’m wondering what ways I can change to make the ordinary routines less like mommy duty and more like prayer.  The ordinary routines are not going anywhere!  Being totally present to laundry or making dinner takes effort for me as does encouraging my children to execute responsibilities.   

The fabulous birthday cake I recently made we will remember for a LONG time, but what really shapes who we are, who we become, who we help our families become is our day to day, ordinary self and actions.  Being kind every now and then, exercising sporadically, studying only now and then yields little result.  Working on a long project (a novel?) only once in a while provides nominal progress.  But being fully present to every word of Mother’s Goose thirty days straight may be a meditation.  Having an ordinary glass of wine at the end of the day with a spouse is blessing.  

      

 

Dandelion Day

Dailiness as dandelions who
sprout yellow petals to puff
fluffy white and float when
we do not know but to be
saffron today in God’s palm
without fear of what being
lifted into the air to plant
elsewhere might feel like
the present butter-hued being
one new day open golden
the exact life we have already