Living an Intentional Life
Embracing the ordinary in amongst the moments
We tend to believe that life is defined by its grand moments. Things like overseas trips, our wedding day, the career breakthrough, the artistic masterpiece that moves us to tears. These experiences, we tell ourselves, are the things that matter… the things that make life extraordinary.
And yet, if we look closely, we see that these moments might be better described as out of the ordinary interruptions to something much quieter.
On any morning, in a train carriage heading into the city, there is a quiet rhythm to see, if we’re willing to look. A student dozing lightly against the window. A couple speaking in hushed tones. A novel held loosely in someone’s hand, its spine softened by use. Through the window, we might see two people on a bench, leaning in as if mid-confession or mid-laughter or a family walking out to their car ready for the day.
But look a little further and you might see someone fidgeting with anxiety in their seat, a tense phone call cut short before the last word, someone yawning into a plastic container of a breakfast they didn’t really want. There is the frayed sleeve on someone’s shirt, a man resting against the glass with eyes red from sleep or sorrow, the graffiti on the fence as you pass by a suburban block of flats. All sorts of moments of messiness.
Life is here too, in its unpolished, unfiltered state. Not always beautiful, but always real.
These scenes unfold every day, unnoticed. They are unremarkable only because we are used to overlooking them. But to notice is to retrieve something from the blur. Noticing brings shape and texture to time. It makes the passing moment feel less disposable, and more like something that belongs to the story of a life.
Life, I believe, is lived in the ordinary.
It happens in the waiting, the commuting, the conversations on a bench, the cooking, the unremarkable catch-up at the end of the day.
It is not just in the declaration of love but in the thousand small acts that sustain it. Things like remembering how someone likes their coffee, contacting your friend even if you’re only in town for a day, walking along a creek on your own and noticing the birdsong. Not just in the great work of art, but in the daily practice of making something with care.
Life really is made up more of the ordinary than of the extraordinary. “If life were only moments”, the Baker’s Wife sings in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, “then you’d never know you had one”
She realises that life is both the extraordinary moment of passion, and the routine of the everyday. And crucially, the everyday is where we remain. “Let the moment go,” she sings, “but don’t forget it for a moment, though.”
This realisation is not far from what Søren Kierkegaard warned against; sleepwalking through life. Too many people, he argued, exist rather than live. They go through the motions, waiting for meaning to arrive later, as if real life is always just beyond the horizon.
Nietzsche’s thought experiment, the eternal recurrence mentioned in Thus Spake Zarathustra and in The Joyous (Gay) Science, asks us to consider if we had to live this life again and again exactly as it is, down to the smallest detail, how we would we want it to be. Not just the big stuff and triumphs, but also the long waits, the restless nights, the half-finished conversations, the jet lag, the ordinary Tuesday afternoons. Would you curse that fate, or embrace it?
The question isn’t meant to suggest we actually will repeat our lives eternally. Rather, it’s a way of asking: are we living in a way we could bear to live over again? It shifts our focus from abstract goals to the quality of the everyday.
If the life you’re living now were the only one you ever had and had to repeat what would you pay attention to?
What would you treat with greater care? Eternal recurrence, in this sense, is about presence, not grandeur or the extraordinary. It’s about seeing the ordinary as something worthy of deep attention, because it may, in some essential way, be all we ever really have.
An Intentional Life
An intentional life is one that does not merely wait for these moments to arrive but recognises that art, love, and beauty are not rare phenomen but are invitations that appear all the time, waiting for us to notice them.
John Dewey, in Art as Experience, argued that art is not confined to galleries and theatres but is something that emerges when we are fully present.Things like a well-prepared meal, a thoughtful conversation, and the warmth of a home can be artful if approached with care and attention.
Beauty is not something separate from life but a way of perceiving it. Keats, in his famous lines, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, suggests that beauty is not about aesthetic perfection but about seeing things clearly, without artifice.
Sometimes that means literally stopping to see it. And sometimes, it means capturing it… maybe taking a photo not of the birthday cake, but of the unmade bed. Not of the graduation stage, but of the kitchen the night before, where someone quietly ironed a shirt (or the morning after). These are not the photos we usually frame. But they can be the ones that help us remember how full a life really was.
Try it. Take a photo of your front door. Your morning coffee. The schoolbag dropped in the hallway. A half-read book. The mess on the kitchen counter after a family dinner. Not to post, not to impress anyone, but to remind yourself: this is what life looks like, here and now. These are the pages between the chapters.
But living intentionally doesn’t mean being switched on all the time.
Life is tiring. Some days are dull or frustrating, and just hard. Intentional living doesn’t necessarily mean turning every experience into a meditation. It means that even in those moments, we stay open to the idea that something might matter. It’s reminding ourselves that even on an ordinary day, with all its messiness and discomfort, we’re still in possession of a fragile, temporary gift.
Living with intention means letting go of the idea that meaning is somewhere else. That it’s a destination we’ll eventually reach if we keep pushing. Instead, it asks us to stop. To notice. To find meaning in what’s already here.
It’s standing in a queue and choosing to see the person next to you.
It’s resisting the urge to always fill silence.
It’s making time and space to create a quiet dinner on your own, even when take-away and TV would be easier.
It’s accepting that sometimes, life is simply a walk, a conversation, a shared cup of tea, and that these moments are the whole point of an intentional life.
We don’t need more peak moments. We need to cultivate the capacity to live more deeply in the space between them.
Not a perfect life.
Not a dramatic one.
But a life that’s noticed, tended, and ultimately, remembered, not just for its highlights, but for its depth, its messiness, and its beauty.
A life without intention risks becoming a series of missed encounters, a chain of experiences that pass by without ever truly being inhabited. But a life lived deliberately, where art, love, and beauty are not things we wait for but things we cultivate and set ourselves up to notice, offers something far richer.
Because in the end, life is a fragile, temporary gift that is lived not just in the “moments”, but in the ordinary.
It’s nice to think about the mundane things that make life feel real instead of being caught up in the comparison game and highlight real. Things we do when we aren’t being perceived or performing for other people .
This is such a beautiful piece. Thank you for sharing ❤️