Adventure is great, holidays, celebrations, weddings, buying new things, shopping sprees, vacations, new jobs, promotions, and new experiences! Those are great things to experience and pursue if we’re into those things. But we don’t always get the chances to do those and we don’t need them anyway to be happy and have fun, thrilling lives! There’s so much beauty in the mundane, extraordinary in the ordinary, simple joys in everyday. Let’s cherish, savor, and deeply appreciate them!
Check out my post in the Page section on the menu:
“Small Things Forgotten”
https://inspirationalgem.wordpress.com/small-things-forgotten/
This page explains my goal of reclaiming and shedding light on the simple, often abandoned things, the mundane aspects of our lives like the colors, the textures, the hues and simple conversations, lines and edges and our favorite books and knick knacks and the sounds in the streets, the wetness on bottles of drinks, the fragrance of cookies baking or food being cooked, our kitchen table or dresser even if it’s plain and just getting old or boring now, the rooms in our house, the streets we walk each day, the ground we walk upon, the hills, buildings, and trees we pass by on our way to work…and how they are beautiful even when they’re not, merely because they make up our lives each day, every single day and they are part of us. They are no less important than the big celebrations and vacations and holidays and weddings, all the “big” things many of us often wait for, search for, hope for, and sometimes feel incomplete, jealous, depressed or low without, either because we want them and don’t have them or because society as a whole says we should have them and if we don’t, we can feel like outcasts or less than successful.
I love to take pictures of “ordinary” or “boring/plain” objects making them look beautiful, mysterious, obscure, nostalgic, or difficult to detect what they are.
Like this one:
Can you tell what it is?!
I can’t either! Lol And it’s my own picture I took at work of something we see/use everyday! I remember taking the picture of whatever it is and trying to obscure it, mystify it. And it worked a little too well because now I can’t figure out for the life of me what it is. To me, it looks like packages that come in the mail but I’m nearly certain it’s not!
I even searched the place all day one day looking for it and to no avail! I think the point of this photo Activity
of de-focusing or obscuring objects is to have others guessing, not our own selves but oh well! I guess that just goes to show my madd skills! ;-D
Here are some links if you are interested about photography and photographing everyday objects and tips to taking pictures with a smartphone.
http://digital-photography-school.com/the-16-most-photogenic-everyday-objects/
http://thephotographerwithin.com/2014/01/make-everyday-objects-look-amazing/
http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2013/08/07/close-up-photography-creative-ideas-for-photographing-everyday-objects/
(Caution: this website uses cookies and they can store them or access them on your device so if that’s not ok with you, you may not want to click it) It’s about taking pictures of everyday objects such as a strap on a shoulder bag, a lemon slice in a drink…and making them beautiful in pictures or de-focusing them to make them more interesting and not being able to tell what they arE
How
fascinating!
http://digital-photography-school.com/5-ways-to-take-better-smartphone-photos/
Even if you aren’t interested in photography there are other ways to appreciate and express gratitude or joy for the simple gifts of living like writing/poetry, drawing or painting, or just basking in the beauty, soaking it all up with as many senses as you have!
😀
Here are some of my pictures of simple, everyday things and inspiring quotes I have come across that convey, in some way, the message of how every “ordinary” day is beautiful.
Can you tell what this one is?!
If you can’t tell, why should I?! Lol
;-D
“You can be in love with one thousand views and skylines and souls and minds at once. Don’t apologize for your burn, your passion, or your enthusiasm. Enthusiasm propels the world.” – Victoria Erickson
Hmmm….;-p
“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” ~
Frances Hodgson Burnett
“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” ~ Elliott Erwitt
“Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.” ~
Desmond Tutu
“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.” ~
Boris Pasternak
What in the world? An x-ray pic of a spinal cord?!?! Or maybe it’s just a weird pic of a Center City Philadelphia building. I sent it to my mom in a text and said guess what it is and she couldn’t so I said it’s a spinal cord and she screamed “Eww oh my god Eww!!” and deleted it instantly. Lol 😀 She believed me.
“I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.” ~ Sarah Williams
Light graffiti!
“Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.” ~
Bill Moyers
“As a matter of fact, I deliberately look for the mundane, because I feel these stories are ignored. The most influential things that happen to virtually all of us are the things that happen on a daily basis. Not the traumas.” ~
Harvey Pekar
This looks like cold hard cash. That’s because it is! It’s someone’s penny collection. I don’t know whose though.
The perfect snack. No mystery here. MmmMmmm
“What I like about The Sims is that I don’t have a normal life at all, so I play this game where these people have these really boring, mundane lives. It’s fun.” ~
Gerard Way
Lol Remember this quote the next day you crave a more adventurous life! Some people would give anything for a bit of simplicity. ;-D
One of those containers to keep coins in with a toy camera effect on the pic.
“Actually I think Art lies in both directions – the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing.” ~
Peter Hammill
Busstop.
“The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.” ~
F. Sionil Jose
” Bus stop, wet day, she’s there, I say
Please share my umbrella
Bus stop, bus goes, she stays, love grows
Under my umbrella
All that summer we enjoyed it
Wind and rain and shine
That umbrella, we employed it
By August, she was mine” ~ The Hollies
And this is???
The rim of a
glass soda bottle (or a photo of one) dressed up in a leaky toy camera effect!
“I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.”
Harvey Pekar
Can you guess this one?
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.
.
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It’s raindrops on my dad’s car window! With a street light in the distance.
“every time we go out into the world we can choose to be alert to see what we’ve not seen before. a trip to the corner store can contain a multitude of universes. it only requires a conscious decision to “tune in” and activate all the senses to be open to what we don’t know yet” ~ Keri Smith
And we can look at things we see everyday in a different way than we usually do!
The picture on the left was taken after 10:00 at night! Right when a lightening bolt ventured across the sky! And I took the pic on the right just a few seconds later after the lightening disappeared! Isn’t it amazing?! A lightening bolt lights up the whole sky like that but it happens so quickly we don’t realize.
What a beautiful lesson to us! When we’re completely in the dark, we can find just one sliver of light or spark of hope, joy, or beauty that can light up our world.
Purple rain.
Rainy night in my dad’s car under the blue, blue Moon. That’s my dad’s Kindle lit up in the window.
I read a book called “a new adventure everyday 541 simple ways to live with pizzazz” by David Silberkleit.
The book is about how we don’t have to travel to be adventurous, we don’t have to bungee jump or climb a mountain, we don’t have to take big risks and don’t even have to leave our houses to have a thrilling adventure. Those things are fantastic and I definitely would love to and hope to engage in some of those one day but as I have said, they are not necessary to be adventurous.
And the author of this book IS an adventurous person in the sense I mention above. He has traveled to various places and tried new things, took risks, and engaged in big thrilling activities such as rock climbing, sailboat racing, scuba diving, motorcycling, visiting other countries…..he believed that was the only way to be adventurous and have a thrill. Then after forty years he realized that being adventurous can be more simple but still as rewarding, it can mean “discovery of a unique new color of silver reflected in a cloud after sunset or a conversation with the person sitting next to me on a New York subway, just to see if maybe we have something in common.” He also lists: asking his father what he remembers about being his age and telling his best friend something he would have never told anyone before.
In his book he lists many simple, inexpensive activities we can do every single day to bring some adventure into our lives without traveling the world or jumping out of an airplane. I hope anyone who wants to travel and rockclimb and go sailboat racing will! That sounds like a lot of fun! But many, probably most of us cannot do that often but we CAN explore and engage in mini but still thrilling little adventures each day.
Some suggestions the author gives are: admire the small businesses – introducing yourself to the owners and having a look around even if the products or services offered are something you would never use, greeting everyone you see that day without waiting for them to say hello first (I’m so shy so this is definitely a thrilling adventure for me that takes guts!), go on a scary ride at a theme park, pay attention to the name tags of employees in the stores you go to, write down all the things you need to forgive yourself for then burn or bury it or float it down a river, make a compromise with someone, take a whole day and do not criticize yourself, draw self portraits in different ways including two using only your left hand.
The possibilities are infinite!
The point is NOT to avoid big adventures like traveling and sky diving if that’s what we want but to also cherish the simple forgotten things all of us always have access to.
Let’s not overlook all that we currently have no matter how simple! 😀 And let’s use our creativity and imagination and see what we can do with all the things we have every day to make them even more thrilling!
I wish you much love and passion and thrilling adventures whatever you choose to do! ❤
Xoxo Kim 😀
