[This is the unedited version of an article that appeared in the "Porch Light" column in the February 2010 print and e-zine editions of FPF]

Extraordinary (Unedited)

by Barry Clark

Most of my friends are divorced.  It is not an experience that any of us wants to repeat.  Painfully aware that the fairytale ending eluded us, we live in a defensive crouch while we struggle to figure out why.  Some have never stood upright since; the ones who have often walk with a limp.  We learned to hide the wariness in our eyes that would betray us.  We made vows intended to wall us off from another agony but which succeed only at walling us in with an agony of a different sort.

A friend told me once that she would consider a shared life again only if she felt it could be extraordinary.  Surely we must have talked about what ‘extraordinary’ might mean, yet I can‘t recall a single conversation.  Perhaps, because the sense of ‘extraordinary‘ resonates so powerfully, it needed nothing more.  Who wouldn’t want that?

Yet the question remains.

Our lives have a rhythm, regular as a heartbeat, shaped by necessity and routine.  We hunt and gather; we domesticate our young; we seek warmth and solace in family and friends, and sometimes with strangers.  We long for permanence and a connection to something larger.  Alone or in tandem whatever richness we are to find, whatever meaning we are to assign, lies waiting to be discovered, hidden like a jewel in this ordinary ebb and flow of our days.

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, writing about metaphor in art, note that “Aesthetic experience is … not limited to the official art world.  It can occur in any aspect of our everyday lives--whenever we take note of, or create for ourselves, new coherences that are not part of our conventional mode of perception or thought.”#  This is the means of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.  We deliberately choose to see common, everyday events in a new way, one that is open to seeing in every act and every moment a meaning that brings a kind of  reverence into our lives and the lives of those we love.  It arises when we see with the heart rather than the eyes, and then, if only for the briefest of moments, it pitches us into a higher plane of reality.   It is the reality of Inner Truth, which is, says the I-Ching, our memory of what Harmony feels like.  

Last summer a dear friend described to me just such a moment as she watched her daughter playing her violin along with a CD, the notes unimportant as she danced, lost in the music and the joy of being at one with it.  It could have been just a child’s overly exuberant practice session, but it was instead made extraordinary by her mother’s act of seeing the moment with her heart rather than with her eyes.  In that moment the noisy ordinariness of a child’s music practice was transformed into a conscious experience of wonder, of tenderness and love, simple and unadorned.

We all have had such experiences.  Often they come to us in the presence of great beauty, of grace undeserved, or the incomprehensible kindness of pardon.  Less often perhaps we may have experienced it when in one of our own rare moments of egolessness we saw another as they really are, without defense or pretense.  What would it be like to live each day with the certainty that by simply paying attention we might at any moment experience the exquisiteness of such poetry?

Within the ordinary, if we can simply open ourselves to it, lies not the fantasy we think we want, but the extraordinary reality of what we truly treasure.

- Barry Clark

Stafford, VA