In my 20s I was chasing everything life has to offer, success, fame, and everything that can stroke the ego. At home on weekends means being a loser and being out means living the life. I can say that I have a fair share of success and a bit of fame but perspectives change as your view becomes wider. Between then and now, I find myself choosing something more predictable, something more quiet, something less than extraordinary like a morning cup of coffee after the kids have gone to school or my rosary enroute to work.

We have built our lives chasing the next big thing, every country to visit, every new experience to collect, every latest product to try. Experience has become a currency, a status symbol. The more you have, the better you are as a person. We have been infected, as it were, by the YOLO virus: you only live once, so fill it with as much novelty as possible.
But I wonder what happens when we do the exact opposite.

We dismiss the ordinary and the repetitive as mundane, as if life’s meaning is found only in the novel and the exciting. But consider the fisherman who casts the same net every morning. The artist who sits at the same desk, at the same hour, and paints. The chef who has cooked the same dish for decades and still finds something to improve. The mother who wakes before everyone else to prepare breakfast. The father who takes the same route to work, year after year, not because he has no imagination, but because he has people depending on him. These are not people who have given up on life. These are people who have found it.

Repetition and doing the ordinary does something to us. We become what we do repeatedly. The fisherman not only catches the fish, he learns about the sea. The mother not only makes breakfast, she becomes the person her children can count on.

The ordinary is not the enemy of meaning. It is meaning, the form meaning takes when it decides to stay.

There is something in the word itself worth holding. Routine comes from route, a road, a path worn by repeated passage. A routine, then, is not a rut. It is a road that knows you. You have walked it so many times that it remembers your weight, your pace, your pauses. It does not surprise you. It does something better: it receives you. And in that receiving, in that dailiness, mastery quietly forms.

Consider the salmon. It swims upstream against everything, spawns, and dies. But its death is not a failure. It is the final act of a complete life. Its body feeds the river, the bears, the trees, the very water that will carry the next generation. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is left over. It served its purpose fully, without remainder.
Perhaps that is what the ordinary asks of us. Not drama. Not novelty. Just to show up, to do the thing, and to feed what comes after us.

In the ordinary there is no rush, only the slow accumulation of a life that knows what it is doing. In the routine, nothing is new, but everything is deeper. We spend so much of our lives looking for somewhere to arrive, when the road beneath our feet has been the destination all along.