Grounding Yourself in the Aesthetics of the Mundane
Photo @dyuha
Lately, it feels like looking for beauty in the most mundane places of everyday life might have "why bother?" written all over it.
It’s a fair point. The world feels like a constant dumpster fire in one way or another. We're bombarded by headlines of war and division and impending doom, overwhelmed by to-do lists of our own making, squeezed by the crushing and ever-growing cost of living, or pulled in too many directions at once by a culture that worships productivity like a cult. In the midst of all that, noticing how the light hits the steam from your morning coffee might feel… well, sort of trivial. Pointless, even.
But lately, I’ve been thinking it’s the opposite. That these small moments of beauty—mundane, ordinary, easily missed—might be the only real lifelines we have through all of this. The only path of resistance we can create within our own hearts and minds.
I’ve been moving through some big internal shifts over the past few years. Moving, divorce, career angst, and menopause (which absolutely no one prepares you for the horrors of). All these big, big life changes... stress stacked on top of more stress. There have been times when I’ve felt like I’m dissolving and reforming all at once. And when my mind gets too loud or too muddled or my body too raw to want to face the realities of the little prisons we build for ourselves and call a life, the only thing that helps me come back to myself is noticing the quiet, grounding details of the world around me.
A walk through the woods. The sound of wind through dry leaves. The way a crow hops sideways across a utility line, tilting its head to meet my eye and wonder at the strangeness of humans. The warmth of a mug against my palms. The smell of rain on the pavement.
These aren’t big important things. They’re not thoughtfully planned, designed or curated. They're not "important" enough for us to even register most of the time. But they ask nothing of me. And maybe that’s why they feel like medicine.
There’s something radical about choosing to pay attention to what’s soft and slow and beautiful when everything around us encourages speed and harshness and cynicism. It’s a practice. A gentle refusal of the chaos of modern life. A rejection of the profiteering of our collective suffering and sadness. A way of saying: I am still here. I still notice. You can't make me rush. You can't make me blind to my own experiences forever.
For me, this kind of noticing is what keeps me grounded. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t cancel the hard stuff we all have to face in life. It doesn't change what the powers that be are trying to do to our souls. But it helps me move through my life with more grace. It’s a quiet form of gratitude, and in times like these, even that feels like a small act of resistance.
Some days, it’s as simple as sorting through a pile of warm laundry in the living room while the cat sleeps on the couch, sunlight pooling around him like it was poured just for that spot. Other days, it’s harder, and all I can manage is cracking the window to let the wind touch my face just to remember that I have one. That I'm still a person, worthy of being noticed and loved. I light a candle, not for ambiance but because the soft flicker makes me feel less jagged. I go on long walks in the woods near my house and whisper little hellos and thank yous to the trees. Every morning, I cry in the car on my way to work and then stare up at the sky until it feels like I’m being held by something bigger before going inside.
Menopause has made me feel like I’m living in a body I don’t quite recognize, and there’s grief in that. There's grief in aging, in changing, in not always feeling like myself. There's grief in watching a marriage end, even when you know it had to or you wouldn't survive. There's grief in feeling trapped by your life because you can't imagine a way out that doesn't end in destitution. There's grief in feeling the collective suffering at the hands of a system designed to exploit and discard. But when I notice beauty in the most mundane things, it helps me trust that there’s still something steady here. Something still worth loving, of being in awe of. It reminds me that the world hasn’t given up on wonder, even when we've all forgotten how to look for it.
And maybe that’s why I’m writing this.
Not because I think I’ve figured anything out or that paying attention to dust motes in sunlight will fix the economy, or heal the world, or help you figure out how you'll make rent next month. But because this practice, of noticing the plain and ordinary and making it sacred, has been quietly keeping me afloat.
If you’re overwhelmed, burnt out, exhausted by the noise of modern life… I want to gently suggest that you look for the soft things. The beautiful, quiet, pointless things. Not because they’re productive. Not because they’ll make you better at anything. But because they remind you that being alive can still be tender and textured and strange and worth it.
We don’t need to earn beauty. We just have to remember to see it. To bear witness to wonder.