Most of us are ordinary too. We have our moments of glory, when we are sitting together enjoying our kids in a high school musical, or college recital. We carry a handful of stories about the trip to the Chesapeake Bay, or kayaking on the Delaware.

 

But in the gaping stretches of time that come in between those epic marital splashes of joy.... we wait. Small hands folded, our lives offer a sameness and a bleakness that drones on.

 

I wonder which is the real life. The glorious swelling of happiness when our firstborn walks up to the podium to graduate, or the plodding decades of rescuing socks from under the bed, and sitting alone at the table when everyone has hurried off to more interesting pursuits. If duration is the measuring stick, the droning wins hands down. The stellar moments can feel like a drop in the ocean, or a ribbon of ore in a mountainside.

 

Perhaps we all tend to hold up our massive amounts of bland days against the glittering merriment of that couple we can't shake the tendency to compare ourselves to.

 

Their bliss is never ending, we imagine with a vengeance. Why can't the distribution be more unilateral? I have vastly more than my share of ordinary.

 

But would that drop in the ocean, otherwise called a pearl, be as exquisite if it lay in a heap of hundreds on the shore? Would that ribbon of gold be as valuable if it somehow became common as clay?

 

Pearls and gold are not commonplace, but many people think they are worth hunting for and clutching tightly when you find them.