How to Find Beauty in the Mundane

Ciao lovelies! To be honest with you lovelies for a second, I’ve been having a hard time lately. Things are chaotic and stressful as I approach the end of the Fall semester of my final year in university. There’s a lot of responsibilities on my shoulders, but I decided to sit down right now and remind myself, and all of you, about a skill that I feel is highly important to society that is being lost: how to find the beauty in everyday life, AKA beauty in the mundane.

Unfortunately, the modern world seems to have lost it’s time for beauty, or so it feels. Maybe the right word is to say, that it feels like modern society has lost touch with the art of finding beauty in the everyday. Instead, we criticize, scrutinize things until they lose their beauty. It feels as though today’s society would rather be unhappy with things than appreciate the subtle beauties in things around us. I’m not saying that you can’t be unhappy with things like politics, human rights violations, etc- those are all valid things to have strong opinions and unhappiness with. But I feel like recently in our society, nobody takes time to appreciate little pleasures in life.

For examples; how nice it is to feel the breeze come through on an exceptionally hot day, or how beautiful the autumn leaves look on the trees, or even how nice it is to eat a hot meal on a cold day. Things that may seem small or insignificant in passing, because of our busy lives, but are truthfully very lovely.

I feel that a big part of appreciation of the little joys of life, is that one needs to be grateful and open to the idea of thankfulness. While I mentioned earlier, yes, there are things in this world that one should be angry about- in your daily life, there are also many joys.

Think about the small joys throughout your day. Do you notice them? It can be something as small as the opportunity to wear your favorite scent, or something as large as a special event that you get the pleasure of attending. It can be something that happens fast, almost unnoticeable in passing, like a faint sound of music, or something more obvious, like a meeting with a dear friend.

It can be hard to notice the small joys of life as we become burdened with many tasks. We may become weighed down by chores around our living space, homework or career work, we may even become tired of social interactions and things we once found to bring us happiness. We may get burned out, exhausted, no longer wanting to continue on the paths we liked before.

In these times of distress, it may help to turn a new filter to the world. To seek out the small joys in our lives, to remind us to keep going.

For myself, sometimes I feel burnt out because I have so much going on. Each class demands quite a bit of my time, I have a job, and of course, I blog and run OFT’s social media. On top of all of that, I must take care of myself and my living space.  This can become exhausting, and I can forget how subtly good life can be. These are the days where I remind myself to seek out the little joys. Here are some things I look for/do to remind myself of life’s happiness:

·         Listening to new music. I find that seeking out new music that I end up enjoying helps me feel more in-touch with life and the little happy moments. Recently I’ve been binging as much Waltz music as I can find by independent creators on YouTube, I’ve found quite a few songs this way that I like to play while writing.

·         Seeking out good food. What I mean by this is that on days where I feel really unhappy with life, I seek out something that tastes good and try to have a bit. Not really “emotional eating” but more so just trying to partake in the small joy of a good meal or tasty snack.

·         Try to notice more of nature’s beauty. I enjoy noticing the little things that are so beautiful or lovely in nature. Something I have the joy of seeing often on my walk to work each day is the bustling community of squirrels around. I love seeing them running around, sometimes playing with each-other by chasing each-other around, other times they are preparing for winter, sometimes they sit up and stare at passerby. It helps me feel so connected to nature to just stop for maybe one minute, or two, to notice things like that.

·         Create something. If I have more than a few spare moments during the day, I often feel the desire to create something. It doesn’t have to be the most perfect or good thing in this world. But knowing that I can make something with my own two hands and sheer will, that is magical to me. It brings me so much joy.

As you can see, lovelies, there’s really so much beauty in what we might consider “mundane.” We just have to open our eyes.

What is the most beautiful yet subtle thing you notice about your daily life? Is it some part of your routine, or does it happen less often? Is it something extra special to you? Will you be taking more time to notice things like it, or did you already pay high attention to life’s little joys before?

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