A Whole Life Within an Ordinary Day

A woman walks home with a few groceries. A song from a passing car brings back a summer from years ago. She remembers a friend she has been meaning to call. In a shop window, a colour catches her eye. Accompanying her is a concern about someone she loves, and an idea she keeps returning to.

She continues down the street, carrying the particulars of her life: memories, affections, worries, preferences, unfinished thoughts, and hopes.

Something similar happens as we answer emails, prepare lunch, drive to an appointment, or put away the laundry. We move through familiar activities while a whole life accompanies us.

What might happen if we became a little more interested in that life as we were living it?

An ordinary day offers many places to begin.

Perhaps you could pause at a natural break: after finishing a task, while drinking your coffee, or before turning on the television. Give yourself a moment to ask:

What has caught my attention today? What has stayed with me?

You might remember a conversation that left you feeling understood. A photograph you lingered over. Something you wanted to say. A moment of pleasure, an unexpected sadness, or an idea that made you curious.

Choose one and stay with it for a little longer.

Suppose a friend came to mind while you were making lunch. You could ask yourself what you were remembering. Was it how easily you used to laugh together? The feeling of being known? An experience you shared?

That passing thought may bring an affection into view. It may also help you recognize something you would welcome more of in your life now: companionship, humour, or time with someone around whom you feel at ease.

Becoming interested in the thought gives you a chance to respond. You might send a message, suggest a walk, or tell her what you remembered. A moment of remembering can become a moment of connection.

Your interests offer another place to pay attention.

Notice what you linger over: the books you pick up, the questions you ask, the colours you enjoy, the conversations that draw you in. Perhaps you keep stopping to look at gardens. Perhaps a subject mentioned on the radio makes you want to understand more. Perhaps you feel a familiar pleasure when you arrange something, solve a problem, or work with your hands.

Ask yourself: What is it about this that interests me?

There may be something here you would enjoy learning, making, exploring, or returning to. You could borrow a book, take a photograph, write down an idea, or spend ten minutes with materials you already own.

Giving an interest a little room allows you to discover what might grow from it.

Your concerns and discomforts also deserve attention.

You may notice that the same unfinished conversation keeps returning to your mind. Or that you feel irritated whenever another commitment takes up time you had hoped to keep for yourself. You might realize how tired you are once the house becomes quiet.

A useful question here is: What needs some care or attention?

Perhaps you need information, help with a responsibility, a clearer agreement, or time to rest. Recognizing the concern can help you identify a response: ask a question, make an appointment, explain what you need, or reconsider a commitment.

Care becomes practical when it influences how you treat the woman living this day—including her time, energy, and needs.

There is also value in noticing what you are already bringing to ordinary moments.

Think of a conversation in which you listened carefully. A difficulty you worked through. Something you made more welcoming, understandable, or beautiful. A moment when you expressed yourself honestly or helped someone feel included.

What did you bring to that situation? Patience? Imagination? Experience? Courage?

Recognizing these qualities helps you see capacities that are available to you. You can choose to develop them and use them again. The patience that helped one conversation may help another. An idea you contributed may become something you and someone else build together.

This is part of the potentiality within an ordinary day: opportunities to strengthen a relationship, develop an interest, address a concern, or put a capacity into practice. What you notice can influence what you do next, and what you do next can make a meaningful difference in your own life or someone else’s.

Today, you might choose just one moment to explore:

What did I notice?

Why does it matter to me?

What small response would give it some care or room to grow?

Over time, these moments can help you become more familiar with your own life—with what nourishes you, what asks something of you, and what you would like to bring into being.

The woman moving through your ordinary day has a history, relationships, interests, abilities, and hopes. Becoming interested in her is one way of caring for her.

An invitation to explore your own ordinary day

To accompany this article, I’ve created a printable journaling page from The Damselfly Path. Three simple prompts invite you to notice something from your day, explore why it matters, and consider what you might give care or room to grow.

You’re welcome to print as many copies as you wish for your personal use. You might return to it throughout the week, discovering something different each time.

Download the Ordinary Day Journaling Page

Your life is worthy of your interest.

Joanne 💗

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Looking at Our Lives from Different Perspectives

There are times when we have thought about a situation so often that it feels as though we have examined every part of it. Yet we keep returning to the same concern or explanation. What might we discover if we gave our attention to another aspect of the experience?

A painting offers a familiar way to think about this. Standing close, we can see individual brushstrokes and layers of colour. Stepping back, we notice how those details relate to the whole. The painting has remained the same, but our position has changed what we can see.

We can approach our lives with a similar curiosity. A feeling, an expectation, a practical constraint, and something we deeply value may all belong to the same situation. Giving each some attention can help us understand more of what we are living and recognize possibilities we had overlooked.

Imagine a woman who has been thinking about joining a weekly art class. Each time she considers registering, she tells herself that she does not have time. Her days are full, and the question seems settled.

But suppose she pauses to look more closely. She notices how much she misses making things. She also notices an expectation that she should remain available whenever someone needs her. When she looks at her actual commitments, she realizes that some are fixed, while others could be discussed. She still needs to consider the schedule and cost, but she now has a fuller understanding of what is involved.

The question has become more specific. How could she make room for something she values while honouring the commitments she wants to keep? She might begin by asking about a shorter course or talking with someone about sharing a responsibility. Exploring several aspects of the situation has helped her identify something concrete to investigate.

Psychological research offers useful insights into how a change in perspective can affect reflection. In a series of studies published in 2010, psychologists Özlem Ayduk and Ethan Kross examined self-distancing: looking at an experience from an observer’s perspective. Participants who naturally took more of this distance when reflecting on negative memories showed less emotional reactivity. In a study of couples, self-distancing was also associated with more problem-solving during conflict and less responding to negativity with further negativity. [1]

This research gives us a reason to pay attention to how we approach a familiar experience. Replaying an exchange and considering what was happening within it are different ways of reflecting. A little distance may help us notice a concern or response that was difficult to recognize in the moment.

We can also change our perspective by changing the question we ask. What am I feeling about this? What matters to me here? What would I like to understand better? Each question directs attention toward a different part of the experience. Taken together, our answers can give us more to work with.

One particularly useful place to look is at what we already believe or expect. We may carry ideas about what a good parent does, what starting over involves, or what we are capable of learning. Some are well grounded in experience. Others may reflect an expectation we have never quite put into words.

Researchers Charles Lord, Mark Lepper, and Elizabeth Preston explored one way of widening people’s thinking in two experiments published in 1984. They found that asking participants to consider the opposite possibility reduced particular biases in judgment more effectively than simply asking them to be fair and unbiased. [2]

There is an everyday invitation in that finding: give another possibility enough attention to consider it. Before we can do that, it helps to recognize the understanding we are starting from. “I expect this to happen” gives us something more specific to explore than a general feeling that the situation is already settled.

For the woman considering the art class, that might mean noticing, “I believe that making time for myself will disappoint someone.” Once she has named that expectation, she can decide whether she wants to explore it further. Perhaps someone has expressed disappointment before. Perhaps she has never asked what would happen if she were unavailable for two hours. Those are different circumstances, with different possibilities for a response.

This kind of attention can also deepen our understanding of what is going well. We might become curious about why a particular friendship feels nourishing, what we enjoy about a creative practice, or which parts of a new routine we want to preserve. Recognizing what supports us can help us give it a more deliberate place in our lives.

The value of looking from several perspectives is in what we can come to understand and do with that understanding. We may find words for a conversation we need to have, recognize a skill we want to develop, or make space for an interest that matters to us. We can also discover that something we had been questioning deserves to remain as it is.

I invite you to try one small exploration. Choose a situation in your own life that matters to you and feels comfortable to consider on your own. It could be a change you are contemplating, a relationship, or an experience you would like to understand more clearly.

In The Inquiry Framework: A Guided Exploration, I call this lens Held Assumptions. It invites you to notice what you currently believe, expect, or take as given about your situation. An assumption is something you are accepting in your present understanding; the word does not automatically mean you are mistaken.

Begin with this question from the guide:

What, if anything, do you believe or expect in relation to this situation?

Write in your own words. Keep phrases such as “I think,” “sometimes,” or “I’m not sure” when they express what you mean. For now, recording your understanding is enough. If you want to examine whether a particular belief or expectation is justified, you can note that as something to explore later.

Then consider the follow-up question:

Based on what you’ve gathered here, is there anything you might want to explore or follow up on later?

You might identify information to look for or a question to return to. You might simply recognize an expectation that you had not noticed before. Give yourself time to consider what, if anything, you want to do with what you have written.

If you would like to explore this on paper, the free three-page sample includes a short introduction, the Held Assumptions exercise, and a lined writing page.

Download the free Held Assumptions sample (PDF)

Held Assumptions is one of seven lenses in The Inquiry Framework: A Guided Exploration, the first of The Damselfly Path’s Guides for Exploration. The 26-page printable guide offers questions and writing space for considering one situation from several perspectives, bringing your notes together, and exploring what might come next.

You can explore the complete guide in my Etsy shop.

Sources

1. Ayduk, Ö., & Kross, E. (2010). From a distance: Implications of spontaneous self-distancing for adaptive self-reflection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(5), 809–829. Read the study

2. Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., & Preston, E. (1984). Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(6), 1231–1243. Read the study

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