The crisp freshness of the air hits you in the face as you step outside on this cold, wintery morning, deep in the bosom of England. Birds chirping and the low hum of cars passing in the distance are the only sounds that disturb what is an otherwise perfectly serene and silent scene before you. Not long ago, you thought it might be best if you left this quiet village in Derbyshire, but now you understand yourself better, you realise instead that it was that version of yourself you needed to leave behind. 

Your Mother smiles to you as you get into her car to run some errands together, and you smile back, saying more than you ever could with words. As you head towards town, you sit looking out of the window at the fields you’ve driven past hundreds, if not thousands, of times, wondering how they somehow never seem to lose their magnificence. The road you’ve travelled on so many times for so many different reasons is still the same as any other road, until you remember that it has been the start of almost every journey you’ve ever been on. 

There is nothing special about today, the 1,351st Sunday of your life, but that’s ok, because not everything in life needs to be special to be precious. You’ve had “the beauty of mundanity” on your list of writing ideas for some time now, and even though you still can’t quite explain the idea, you feel as though this is as close as you’re going to get. 

You go for lunch at the pub with an old friend and it’s perfectly pleasant. The food is average at best, and the customers that surround you are barely even that, but you share a few laughs with your friend and he makes you smile, and that alone is worth enduring an uninspiring pub lunch. As you sit and listen to him talk about his job, his holidays plans, his social life and so on, you realise how excited he is for his future, how he can’t wait to learn new skills and experience new things, and you can’t help but smile again, because not so long ago you would have resented him for this, unable to understand his excitement, yet now you find yourself just as excited as your friend, which evokes a feeling of warmth and satisfaction within you that you didn’t even realise were possible. On your drive home, you reflect on how that, perhaps, is the perfect example of the beauty of mundanity. 

Once upon a time, you resented everything in your life because it wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t remarkable, it wasn’t special. You wondered aloud what the point of it was if you’re just going to work 37.5 hours a week for the next 50 years. What you failed to see, you now realise, is the beauty of mundanity. The point of it is to have a laugh with your friend at the pub. The point of it is to spend the morning with your Mother, running errands and making each other smile. The point of it is that it’s yours to make what you want of it, it’s yours to do with as you wish, it’s yours to turn the mundane into the beautiful. 

Now you see it, you wonder how it took you so long to understand.