Life is Allowed to be ordinary

​Most days, you will find me in my sunroom.

From spring until the cold finally pushes me back into the rest of the house, this is where I live.
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The room itself is stitched together from stories.
The tiger maple desk where I write was purchased from a woman selling it online. The solid oak chair beneath me came from an estate sale. A yellow Bakelite rolling pin hangs on one wall beside an old milk-glass rolling pin whose wooden handles have been polished smooth by hands long gone. Plants gifted to me by clients crowd the windowsills. A small head vase from my daughter sits nearby.

Outside the wavy glass windows, a rosebush stretches taller than the corner of the house. When I first found it, it was little more than a struggling branch buried beneath years of leaves and neglect. I planted it where I could see it from these windows, where the neighbors could enjoy it, and where the afternoon sun would warm it. Now it blooms every summer as though it has spent years thanking me.

Above my desk hangs a wind chime.

It was given to me after my beloved Roy passed.

Roy was an old English bulldog with a bad heart. We knew it when we adopted him. The veterinarians told us his heart would never be strong and that our time with him would likely be shorter than we hoped.

But nobody ever remembered to tell Roy.

Every morning he woke up convinced life was the greatest gift ever given. A patch of sunlight on the floor was reason enough to celebrate. A car ride was an adventure. A visitor at the door was a friend he simply hadn't met yet. Roy never wasted a moment worrying about how much time he had left because he was too busy enjoying the day he had been given.

When he passed, a friend gave me the wind chime that now hangs above my desk.

Etched into the metal are the words:

Hear the wind and think of me.
In your heart I'll always be.
Roy, 2024.

Sometimes the breeze catches it unexpectedly, and when it does, I don't think about losing him.
I think about what he taught me.

Roy never measured his life by how long it would be. He measured it by how fully he could live it.

As I sit here writing, my hands rest on the tiger maple desk in front of me.

The evening I brought it home, I took a few photographs and sent them to my friend Brian, whom I had known since elementary school.
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I loved the desk immediately. I loved the tiger maple grain, the craftsmanship, the old colonial shape of the legs, and the way the finish caught the light. It was exactly the kind of piece that always caught my eye.

As I stood there looking at it, a thought simply crossed my mind.

Brian would love this.

So I took a few photographs and sent them to him.

A few minutes later he texted back.

"Great purchase, Jen.
You've always had that wonderful eye. That is a sexy piece of furniture."

I laughed when I read it.

It was exactly the kind of thing Brian would say.

We exchanged a few more texts about the desk, the chair, where I had found them, and how lucky I had been to stumble across both pieces. That was it. Just a few photographs, a few text messages, and a conversation about a piece of furniture.

Very shortly afterward, I learned that my friend Brian had passed.

And yet when I sit at this desk, that is not what I think about.

I think about the photographs. I think about the text messages. I think about a friend seeing something beautiful and understanding immediately why I loved it. I think about a friendship that began when we were children and somehow found its way into a conversation about a tiger maple desk decades later.

The memory remains because the conversation happened. Because I thought of him. Because I sent the photographs.
Because he answered.

And somehow, that was enough.

Perhaps that is why, after all these years of reading cards, speaking with Spirit, and listening to people's stories, I find myself returning to the same realization.

Many people do not suffer because their lives lack meaning. They suffer because they cannot see the meaning already there.

A few years ago, a woman sat across from me and told me she didn't think she had done anything important with her life.

She had been married for decades. She had raised children. She had grandchildren now. She had worked when she needed to, volunteered when she could, cared for aging parents, attended church suppers, delivered casseroles after funerals, and spent years doing the things that quietly hold families and communities together.

When she finished telling me about her life, I told her it sounded to me like she had lived a very good life.

She shook her head.

"Everybody did those things."

Every mother she knew had driven carpools. Every neighbor had shown up with a casserole when someone was sick. Every woman she grew up around had spent years caring for children, tending homes, helping parents, volunteering, and carrying responsibilities that nobody thought to write down because they were simply part of everyday life.

She believed purpose was something bigger than that.
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As she continued talking, an image appeared in my mind of an old recipe box, an old metal, worn, loved, dented recipe box that carried the feeling of history with it. It vibrated with memory.

"Do you own a recipe box?" I asked.

The question stopped her cold and for a moment she simply stared at me and smiled, a real smile, the first one I had seen since she sat down.

"Yes, I do."

"Whose is it?"

"My grandmother's."

"Tell me about it."

She laughed.

"Oh, it's awful."

I laughed with her.

"What makes it so awful?"

"The paint is chipped, the lid sticks whenever it's humid, one corner is dented, it's rusted in spots, and you have to be careful opening it because it'll cut your finger if you're not paying attention. Some of the recipe cards still have fingerprints and flour stains on them. I swear there are cookie crumbs in there older than my grandchildren."

By then we were both laughing.

"It's probably the ugliest thing in my kitchen," she said, "but honestly, it's the most important thing I own."

I smiled.

"Of course it is."

"And you kept it because it was your grandmother's."

"Of course I did."

She looked down at her hands and smiled.

"It was my grandmother's."

Then she began telling me about the recipes, about teaching them to her children and later to her grandchildren, about holiday baking, birthday cakes, and traditions that somehow survived every change life brought with it.

The more she spoke, the younger she seemed. The woman who had walked into my office convinced she had never done anything meaningful slowly disappeared, replaced first by a little girl standing in her grandmother's kitchen, then by a young mother teaching those same recipes to her children, and finally a grandmother passing them forward once again.

The recipes may have come from her grandmother's kitchen, but the memories belonged to her. The birthday cakes, the holiday cookies, the laughter around her table, and the grandchildren standing beside her waiting for something wonderful to come out of the oven were hers.
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She had spent years wondering whether she had found her purpose, never realizing she had been living it all along. She had taken the love she was given, shaped it with her own hands, and passed it forward. Maybe her purpose had never been about finding something more.

Maybe her purpose had been helping write the next chapter.

The woman and her recipe box stayed with me long after our conversation ended. As I reflected on her story, I found myself remembering a man who once sat across from me carrying a disappointment he had been hauling around for years.

He believed he had failed.

As he spoke, he told me about a lakefront cabin he had dreamed of owning one day, a cabin much like the one his father rented every summer when he was a boy. Year after year, his father packed up the family and brought them to the same place. They swam in the lake, built campfires, told stories, played cards, cooked outdoors, stared at the stars, let ice cream drip down their chins, and ate watermelon almost as quickly as it could be cut.

As he talked, I understood it.

"I always thought I'd do that for my kids," he told me.

His father had died while he was still in college, and those summers had become precious to him. They weren't simply vacations anymore. They were some of the last pieces of his father he still carried, and he had always planned to give those same memories to his own children.

I asked him what kind of vacations he did give to them.

A smile crossed his face.

"Oh, we did wonderful things," he said.

When the children were younger, they loved Disney movies, so they took them to Disney World several times. His son couldn't get enough of Buzz Lightyear. His daughter loved Pocahontas. As the children grew older, his son developed a fascination with animals, so the family took a safari vacation. They talked about that trip for years afterward.

Eventually they bought a camper and began traveling whenever they could. They stayed in campgrounds where the children met other kids and disappeared for hours riding bikes, exploring trails, and creating the kinds of friendships that only seem to happen during summer vacations. Later, when the children were older and less interested in campground activities, the trips changed. Sometimes it was just the four of them sitting around a campfire. Sometimes they spent the day fishing. Sometimes his son went hunting with him while his daughter and wife went kayaking. Sometimes they talked long into the evening about school, friendships, dreams, and whatever happened to be on their minds.

As he spoke about his children, I heard his father.

“How could he possibly believe he was a failure when he had been such a wonderful father to my grandchildren? How could he not see the success he had given those children by building memories they would carry for the rest of their lives and someday pass along to their own families? I don't understand how he can feel this way.”

When I relayed those words to him, his eyes widened.

"Can you hear my father?" he asked.

"Of course I can hear your father," I replied.

Then I reminded him of every vacation he had just described to me.

I reminded him of Disney World and the safari. I reminded him of the camper, the campgrounds, the fishing trips, the campfires, and the conversations that stretched long into the evening. I reminded him that he and his wife had given their children adventures built around who they were and what they loved, not around somebody else's memories.

As I spoke, something changed.

His eyes sharpened with recognition.

What his father had given him was never a place. It was a foundation. The cabin had simply been where those memories happened.

His children would carry Disney, the safari, the camper, the campfires, the fishing trips, and the long conversations with them for the rest of their lives, just as surely as he carried the memories his father had given him.

The cabin was never the success.

The father was.

And in his determination to become the best father he could be, he had already become exactly the man his father hoped he would be.

As I sit here now, the evening light is beginning to soften through the windows of the sunroom. The wind chime above my desk stirs gently in the breeze. Outside, the dogwood stands where it always has. The rosebush reaches higher than the corner of the house. The plants given to me by clients continue growing quietly on the windowsills.

As I sit here surrounded by these small pieces of life, I find myself thinking about the woman with the recipe box, the father who believed he had failed his children because he never bought the cabin, my friend Brian, and Roy.

When people come to see me, they often arrive carrying questions about whether their lives mattered. They tell me about the dreams that never unfolded the way they imagined, the places they never lived, the accomplishments they never achieved, and the goals they never quite reached. Yet somewhere in the middle of those conversations, something else always appears. A grandmother's recipe box. A father's laughter beside a lake. A text message from an old friend. A beloved dog stretched out in a patch of sunlight.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that we spend far too much time looking for something extraordinary and far too little time recognizing it when it quietly arrives disguised as an ordinary day.

Perhaps that is why the tarot has always fascinated me. Out of seventy-eight cards, only twenty-two belong to the Major Arcana. The rest are the cards of daily life. The cards of work, family, friendship, responsibility, joy, disappointment, love, and memory. The cards that seem so ordinary when they appear, yet quietly build an entire life.

Maybe that is true outside the tarot as well.

Most of life is a Tuesday.

A conversation with a friend. A family vacation. Cookies baked from an old recipe. A dog asleep in a patch of sunlight. A photograph sent through a text message.

The strange thing is that when we look back years later, those are often the moments we remember most clearly. Somehow, those ordinary moments become the story.

Perhaps a good life was never meant to be measured by how extraordinary it looked from the outside. Perhaps it is measured by how fully we lived the ordinary moments while they were here.

The memory remains because the conversation happened.

I see the fullness of life in the Tuesdays we live. I see it in the conversations we have, in the traditions we carry forward, in the vacations we take, in the friendships we build, and in the people we love. I believe that is what so many people miss while they are searching for “purpose.” Not because life is lacking, but because they are looking too far away to see what is already here.
The ordinary moments are where a life is made

Jennifer Belanger is an intuitive practitioner and spirit medium located in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
She offers tarot readings, spirit communication, and ancestral guidance sessions in person, email,  and online. 

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