Ordinary Moments

August 30, 2026

There is something about this time of year that makes the ordinary more noticeable. Summer is winding down. Kids are heading back to school. Calendars start filling up again. The days are still warm, but the evenings feel a little different. There are fewer wet towels thrown over chairs, fewer slow mornings, fewer last-minute decisions to stay outside a little longer.

None of this is particularly dramatic, and that is the point. Most of life does not announce itself as meaningful when it is happening, it looks like the background.

But more and more, I think the background is the thing. When I talk to clients about their experiences as family members (often in families where very big moments can occur on a regular basis), it’s rarely those moments that stand out, it's the ordinary ones they reflect on with admiration.

I used to be an avid photographer, and the photographs I loved to take most were rarely of something obviously beautiful. I was drawn to ordinary objects and tried to frame them in a way that made you look twice. Through photography, I found that the act of paying attention is what reveals the beauty.

Life seems to work the same way.

We spend a lot of time anticipating the memorable moments, and those matter, but when I speak with older clients, what they often remember most vividly are the small things around them, those ordinary moments with family they may no longer experience. And here's the thing, the tragedy isn’t that ordinary moments end, it’s that we usually discover how extraordinary they were only after they’re gone.

I don’t mean that as a sad thought, I actually find it comforting. It is a reminder that we don’t need to manufacture meaning all the time. We don’t have to turn every weekend into an experience or every dinner into a memory. There is plenty of life already happening in the unremarkable parts.

Maybe that is one of the gifts of seasonal transitions, they change the scenery just enough to help us notice what had become invisible. The towels disappear, the backpacks return, and the mornings get busier, and for a moment you realize that the ordinary things you barely noticed were not background at all, they were the picture.

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