Live An Extraordinary Life
How To Make Every Day Remarkable, One Step At A Time
I want to live an extraordinary life. It came to me suddenly, the thought, especially with what I’ve been rumbling with internally as of this last year. This is a conversation I wish to share with you:
What is an extraordinary life?
Is it a life full of adventures? Many rewarding challenges, friends, and good humor perhaps? Fame, fortune, respect, power, mastery, any of these typically sought after ideals? A life which is so ordinary it transcends itself?
Ah, but that last idea sounds so regular, so mundane but people think of the extraordinary in terms of fantasy. We typically only see the highlights of what we perceive to be big, excellent moments and compare ourselves to unrealistic ideals.
Many people don’t even know their own ideals in any way that can be verbalized and if those standards aren’t set, what standard of reality is there for us to pick from? Simpler to not take responsibility for anything, though there is no extraordinary to be had in that, is there?
Think of the fantasy worlds we lose ourselves in and how we run from this mundane everyday life. We often avoid looking into the eyes of our lives as we fear it’s not what it could be and what we might have wanted it to be.
Despite the struggles, an ordinary life, your ordinary life, can lead to the most extraordinary stories, moments, and feelings. These are real moments, valuable moments, those that shake your world in the best and worst of ways on the daily.
What might extraordinary mean?
Extraordinary can be described as something unusual, remarkable, and exceptional or if we’re being dramatic, one might think of the words marvelous, phenomenal, awful, frightful, and tremendous, somewhere in that territory.
I would say that to live an extraordinary life isn’t so difficult and all it takes is a piece of the extraordinary on the daily, something freely given to us and something we give ourselves.
It has nothing to do with comparing yourself to another that lives a life so complex and foreign to yours that to utter the words should swarm you with fear and make you self-conscious to your soul, as to do so immediately places you in a position of wanting what isn’t yours and is a fantasy that puts you at a disadvantage from the get-go.
Waste not your energy on such musings and think of what you could do every day to make your life remarkable, think of what you could do daily to get you where you want to be instead. Start easy, start small.
Pick a goal, break it into its simplest components or parts until it’s no longer unbearably abstract and work on it inwards and upwards. Pick something bearable until you can do more! I’m trying to write a book, for example, so, to get into this larger project, I write poetry and articles that interest me and work into the same themes. It gets me closer to my larger writing goal.
Those you compare yourself to, let them not become phantoms of a life that isn’t and never was. It’s awful to live in someone else’s shadow but doubly so to be in an awful predicament and not realize the extraordinary quality of that moment. Awful is extraordinary and remarkable in itself, those are moments for you to think and learn, those are important parts of our lives.
But what’s the point of having an extraordinary life and not even realizing you’re doing it, even if it’s awful, perhaps it’s tremendous too?
There will be limitations put on you, there will be struggles, but those are the places where extraordinary moments are found. It’s in our limitations that we may be our most capable and creative, giving us a line that we can cross or bound around in a way that only we can, and that is quite achievable if we set the proper boundaries.
The standards and ideals we have will change constantly as you negotiate life and yourself but we should strive to have those conversations with ourselves and to set them, even if they are temporary.
What might I do to be remarkable?
Take a moment every day to remark or notice something unusual or that you’ve become desensitized to due to it being SO usual. How remarkable might your routine be?
You might even BE a remarkable person to someone else some days or for yourself and not even realize it through some small action or a few words of encouragement or honesty.
The smallest actions can have the biggest impacts, cheesy as it is, you never know what good intention can spread. A small act of kindness, a gesture, a smile. This is remarkable in itself.
Though we get caught up in our own worlds and standards and forget to be grateful or give ourselves a more open perspective, that can be a remarkable moment too. Getting caught up is normal but reflection should be doubly so.
Act with presence and pay attention to your conversations, to your work, spend your time and words doing things that make you feel something. Good or bad, sad or happy, just don’t do things that make you feel like a horrible person or make others feel that way, that’s not the goal or helpful!
You see I don’t propose you do something crazy! You can, of course, do crazy things, be spontaneous or dumb every now and again, find those precious moments of admiration, appreciation, laughter, those are the moments that make life remarkable, which makes life extraordinary!
And we miss them, by God, we miss them all the time and they’re always there for us those opportunities for the remarkable.
It’s the small things we do every day, those are the things that matter the most, the small mundane things, the small thoughts, actions, feelings, those are the bulk of the lives we live.
Don’t miss those moments or you’ll miss a hell of a lot more than life, you’ll miss yours.
I want to live an extraordinary life. That mundane text of which we die every day might be the mundane test of which we truly live. That day by day is ours.
Carpe diem, my friends, and live an extraordinary life, it’s there for us.
Thank you for reading! Ilija Begic
