Endowment

Of late, I’ve found myself thinking in aphorisms (and posting them to twitter: follow draagen if you are so inclined), and this morning’s begged more extensive treatment, in part because it morphed as I wrote it into a much bigger idea than I started with.

Here’s what started me on this journey:

“When we endow an ordinary moment with extraordinary weight, it is transformed. This is sometimes awesome and sometimes not.”

 I was trying to express the second part—how sometimes we give ordinary things extraordinary weight and thereby make them a much bigger deal than they ought to be—but I found the first part compelling and evocative. Bringing this truth to my conscious mind feels important.

It has generally been my habit to endow trivial things with disproportionate weight and then work myself into a state of acute anxiety over what, viewed objectively, is no big deal. I have typically made mountains of molehills on a daily basis and then talked myself out of climbing what was in fact a trivial slope. I limited my opportunities because I gave extraordinary weight to an ordinary moment, making a big deal out of no big deal. Not awesome.

There is, however, another totally awesome side to this coin. There’s this opportunity give to ordinary moments an extraordinary positive weight and make them sacred. I’ve been learning to do this without even realizing it: learning to make everyday circumstances holy by appreciating them, by loving them, by being fully present in them.

That, I think, is the real power of endowment; to make what others think ordinary extraordinary and seeing the magic in the mundane.

And that’s cool...