Celebrate the Mundane

Marlane Ainsworth
Jul 3
2 min read

Sometimes it's all we have

Kitchen sink with dish rack of dishes, detergent bottle and pink gloves over the sink. View is of a garden through three wood-framed windows. — Doing the dishes may seem mundane, but it's worth celebrating. You can't wash dishes when you're dead! This is the view through kitchen windows at Evergreen.

Is your day mundane or amazing?

The word mundane comes from the Latin mundanus, which means belonging to the physical world, as opposed to the spiritual or celestial realm. Now it’s come to mean ordinary, dull, routine, boring.

If you’re like me, your days are packed with mundane things like putting on shoes, opening the car door, shutting curtains, ladling soup. Only occasionally do we perform amazing and exciting things like putting a crown on our head, signing a publishing contract with one of the Big Five, or standing on a balcony to bless a heaving crowd far below us.

But the mundane moments we all dismiss with a resigned ho-hum, are amazing, exciting, beautiful.

I suspect that when I’m lying on my deathbed, I’ll think about countless mundane moments that I’ll then recognise were precious and packed with joy and meaning, if only I’d had the sense to realise it at the time.

What sort of things am I referring to?

Seeing dust motes spinning and shining like cosmic stars in early morning sunlight.

Hearing a goods train in the distance trundle over a bridge with a clackety-clack and a warning call on the horn.

Curling fingers around a ladle to dish out zucchini soup for the family.

Biting into a fig freshly picked from the tree while autumn mist swirls around me, chilling my ageing cheeks.

Bending over to tie the shoelaces on my favourite walking shoes.

Drying between my ten toes after a relaxing hot shower.