I admit: I’m a dreamer. At times I find myself sitting on the couch at home, and I watch the saxophone my father played 40 years ago and which renders the living room even nicer, and I dream.
At times I mix dreams and memories, and when I think with a music in the background the dreams, images and emotions unite to make peaceable an afternoon already pleasant. This is what happened last weekend: sitting on the couch I thought about the words of John Legend in his splendid “Ordinary People”.(1)
Often we forget that we are ordinary people, people with merits and also with shortcomings, with our talents and our limitations. With our emotions and with our tears… Ordinary people.
At times the will, almost the need to be special floods our days, actions and thoughts, and we wake up searching for the idea that will change our life or the lottery ticket that will replace our lack fulfillment. The stress and the speed of our lives slowly decenter us, and with lost time we lose the emotions, the looks, the caresses and the hugs that characterize who we are: ordinary people.
When Paul wrote a letter to Timothy he reminded him that a contented spirit is a great gain. When one reaches the conscience that we cannot be special by ourselves, there is peace, hope and love, there is gratitude, consolation, the awareness that Jesus has given his extraordinary life to make us ordinary people with extraordinary hearts.
John Legend advises us to walk slow. I think he’s right. How many times we’ve lost something because we had something else to do. How many times we haven’t had the time to greet someone well or to make a phone call that expresses between the lines, “I care about you.”
A popular saying tells us that we know the value of something only when we don’t have it anymore. It’s true. We spend a lifetime searching for something that will render us special and lose bit by bit all that helps us be who we are. That’s why it is important to live slower. To think more. To listen more. To talk more. To live more… like ordinary people.
I sit on my couch, look at the saxophone and dream. I dream of being an ordinary person but with an extraordinary heart, changed, renewed, transformed by Christ.
Enzo Bifano lives in Rome, Italy, and works as an analytical programmer at a large communications company.
