How to Find the Extra in Ordinary

let me count the ways

You might be surprised to hear this, but I have clean water coming out of the faucet in my kitchen. And most days, I feel absolutely nothing about it.

I turn the handle, and water just comes out all clear and clean. I rinse my plate, wash my hands, and walk away. I don’t stop and think about how amazing it is that clean water travels all the way to my house, through underground pipes, and waits behind a little silver handle waiting for me to turn it. It just happens every day, so it’s like big whoop.

That may be one of the most counterintuitive things about being human. Most things that are totally essential to our lives are completely invisible to our hearts. Water, air, sun, housing, shoes. The people we love who are constantly making a mess and leaving their shoes in the wrong place. Once something becomes familiar, it’s really easy to stop experiencing it as good. Sure, we live with it physically, just not always joyfully.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning gave us the key to reclaiming our joy when she said, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Sure, she was talking about romantic love, but counting can also scrape away the stale crust of familiarity to uncover the delicious goodness underneath.

Counting is, after all, a human pastime. Do you notice? You count all you need to do. You count what went wrong. You count the ways someone disappointed you, the years you lost, the opportunities you missed, and the things other people have that you don’t. We can count like nobody's business, with our eyes closed and our minds not even noticing the reality of our obsession. We are very good at keeping count.

Self-protection demands it, keeping our attention fixed on whatever could hurt, disappoint, or inconvenience us. It counts what is missing because whatever we do not have might become a problem.

Self-protection keeps our minds on what someone did because they might do it again, and we can’t have that. Before anything ever goes wrong it rehearses what might could because surprises are dangerous if we weren’t expecting them, or they aren’t exactly what we wanted.

And all of a sudden, we find ourselves living in an abundant life, feeling deprived of the oxygen we need for joy. Not that we’ve necessarily lost anything, it’s just that we’ve stopped seeing what’s there.

No living creature experiences everything around it. Each one notices only the parts its senses and survival needs identify as important. German biologist Jakob von Uexküll called it Umwelt.

Since the physical world contains more information than any nervous system can absorb, your brain makes choices. It brings the “important” things forward and leaves everything else unnoticed. That’s how two people can occupy the same physical world and experience entirely different versions of it. One sees the traffic, the rude cashier, and the rain that ruined the afternoon. While the other notices the song on the radio, the person who waved them into traffic, and the intoxicating smell of the rain when it hit the pavement. They didn’t have different days or live in parallel universes. Their umwelt just delivered experiences to them.

In the name of self-protection, your attention gives possible problems priority over ordinary goodness. Since your brain can’t process everything, it keeps whatever could hurt, disappoint, or inconvenience you at the front of the line.

And ordinary goodness just doesn’t create much urgency. Clean water doesn’t demand your attention. Neither does the sound of someone you love moving through the next room. When your shoes fit, they don’t interrupt your thoughts to say, “Isn’t this incredible?” And if you have a body part that doesn’t hurt, it’s just stays silent, and you don’t notice how great your elbow is working.

Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation, our tendency to experience less emotional response to something once it becomes familiar. That explains how the extraordinary becomes ordinary through repetition. Your first hot shower after three days without electricity feels like a miracle, and you are so happy just to be warm. But you can take your thousandth hot shower while your brain is off somewhere planning the next thing you’ve got to do and completely miss the miracle.

Having more doesn’t guarantee happiness, because whatever is new eventually joins the rest of the furniture. The new house becomes the dirty house. The answered prayer becomes your current situation. The person you once couldn’t imagine living without becomes the person whose shoes you keep tripping over.

Familiarity fades into the background, but counting brings it back into focus because your attention doesn’t go looking for what’s already working; you have to send it looking, and give it a gold star when it finds it. Send it to your working furnace, your running water, your family, and friends, the body part that doesn’t hurt. And find the joy.

But how do you count common comforts when crises consume your concentration?

By making deposits before you need to make a withdrawal. Every time you stop long enough to register something good about your life, you put a little gratitude in the bank. Noticing how much your grass loves the rain, remembering that someone cared for the chickens that laid the eggs you just bought, or thanking your legs for holding you up as you get out of bed might not seem like major deposits, but each one builds your balance over time. It’s like slipping a dollar into savings every day. One dollar doesn’t feel like much, but enough of them give you something to draw from when life starts to make its withdrawals.

The mistake is waiting until something goes wrong to start looking for what’s good. By then, disappointment is standing at the counter with an open bag demanding everything you have. Which is why gratitude has to be deposited before you need it. Your deposits don’t cancel the bills of pain or tragedy, but they give you something to draw from when those bills arrive.

I’m not saying work harder at trying to convince yourself that life is better than it is, just make sure the bad doesn’t write too many checks for the good.

Nothing in the kitchen has to change for the water to become extraordinary again. You only have to stand at the sink long enough to notice what’s been waiting behind that little silver handle all along.