Finding the Extra in the Ordinary

We live in a world full of noise; physical noise and head noise.  From the time our feet hit the ground in the morning, noise fills our hears, our minds, and our hearts. No, actually, from the time our eyelids open, there is noise; alarm clocks, text alerts, checking social media before even leaving the bed... noise, constant noise.
Not all noise is bad of course. Music, laughter, birds singing in the trees, hearts being shared and poured out....so much beauty to be heard.  Though, I find that we so fill our days and lives with such an abundance of noise, that we often cannot fully appreciate the beauty in the sites and sounds around us in the every day....the extra in the ordinary.

Extraordinary:
Remarkable. unusually great.

Ordinary:
no special or distinctive features. uninteresting. average.

I don't believe our days were meant to be ordinary.  I believe that our mere existence in this grand world obliterates that theory altogether. Boom. Done. Moving on.
However, we can certainly walk out these extraordinary lives in an ordinary way...by simply not seeing the extra in the ordinary.

There is nothing extraordinary about these photos in and of themselves.  They are small glimpses into my day to day, into what can easily seem like my ordinary life.
There are two things that make these photos extraordinary and they are HUGE.

The LIGHT.

and

Choosing to see the EXTRA in the ordinary.

Seeing the sunlight bounce around, cast shadows and illuminate all in its path will never seize to bring me to a place of awe...its beautiful...pleasing to the eye and nourishing to my soul.

LIGHT...

...will always cause contrast and make it's presence known.  It's the very thing that cast beauty onto even the most ordinary of things.

We have a choice every single day of our lives.

We can choose to stop for a moment, look up from our screens, take our minds off ourselves and our plans, and look around....
...breathe in the extra in the ordinary.

See the beauty bouncing around like rays of light...all throughout your days here.

When you choose to see the extra in the ordinary...everything becomes extraordinary.