There are some mornings you just wake up wondering how you got so lucky. That every day situations are not every day situations, and that laughing, really laughing with a loved one, is pure poetry. That sometimes there’s nothing more beautiful than the sound of crows outside your window, and the sounds of water rushing in the shower down the hall.

I wish I could give out hints about how to see the not-so-ordinariness in ordinary things. It’s not easy to point out the absolute fucking beauty everywhere you look unless you convince people to realize that there is more out there than meets the eye. It’s easy for us to fall into the mundane, to see everything as routine and ordinary, and life as only this strange thing where good things happen occasionally but usually everything is boring and mum.

I have no special powers, and nothing came out and told me that everything was actually precious. It was more of a build up of things. It was the way people looked on the ground from standing on a tall building. It was the way that a day is an earth rotation around a star that will one day burn out, and the planet along with it. It was the way that nothing is permanent, and even things like fear and people who annoy you, can be beautiful because what a thing to feel. Because life is a spectrum of feels, and all of them are meaningful. Angels look down on us and wish they could feel what we are feeling. It was the way humans bloomed from water and land into marvelous creatures who can communicate, think, create, steal, make love but also hate, make rules but also songs, cake but also poison.

It’s not anyone’s job to impress us. I read that in an article not too long ago, and that’s really the best way to start seeing every day as magic. I stopped expecting things from people and went within instead. Not in an ‘everyone lets you down so stop expecting things’ way, but I stopped expecting people to be responsible for my happiness. In every situation that you’re in, not everyone is going to be pleasant. Not everyone is going to treat you with respect, or be super helpful or polite. This is ok. People will be rude. People will not care about whether or not you got a good experience from working/talking/co-existing with them. It’s up to us to find some sort of patience and peace in every situation.

As the boyfriend said to me yesterday pretty profoundly while I was yelling at iCloud for not backing up my phone the way I wanted it to: “Take a breath, mi hija. You’re better than iCloud. Are you gonna let it own you right now?”

Sometimes the nuisances of our lives are like clouds, and we are the blue sky. I didn’t make up this metaphor, it was shown to me in a pretty straight-forward animated video in the Headspace app. We can’t always see blue skies, but they’re always there, arching above us, hovering over all of the clouds. The clouds are just passing by, and we are allowing them to. The blue sky is always there, in the same way that the calm is always within us.

We forget how easy it can be to separate ourselves from everything in a single instant. Not to not feel things, but to survey them in a separate way, and appreciate them, and allow them to exist.

I woke up this morning to these words and feelings in my head. I fell asleep at 4am last night watching The Departed, but for some reason at 8:30am I am wide awake and full of perspective. It seems that everything I believe is somehow becoming more and more clear to me as the days go by, but also surprising when it appears in physical things, like on the radio.

This last perspective for instance, of knowing that it’s not all about you, that your happiness is not the focus in every situation, was made clear again to me on the radio last night. I was listening to Paramore play live at the I Heart Radio festival in Vegas. The singer was talking to the crowd in such a humble, grateful way. She said, “You know Paramore isn’t really about Paramore, right?” As if to say, you know all of this success and love we’ve had over these last ten years has nothing to do with us, right? It was about the fans, and it will always be about the fans, because they are the reason you are here. They resonated with everything you had to give them, you gave them something special, and you must always give, give, give.

And Paramore has that awesome fucking song, Ain’t It Fun.

So what are you gonna do, when the world don’t open around you? Ain’t it fun, livin’ in the real world? Ain’t it good, bein’ all alone?

That song really fucking spoke to me during that drive home last night. I heard it before, but it was so fitting with the way I was thinking and feeling, and I couldn’t believe such a fitting thing was playing at such a fitting time. I was singing and dancing in my car, even with all of the Katy cats around me, having just emerged from the Katy Perry concert down the street at Staples Center. It was kind of a cool moment. But then again, every moment is.

See you later in the week! Till then, this song is the best.

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Monique Muro

Monique is an exceedingly happy human from LA. She runs the blog A Novel Quest, and writes. A lot.

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