The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary: In Celebration of Being Average

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Overall, I gave this book one star because I didn’t like the author’s tone or messaging. There were many assumptions and generalizations made and not enough specifics provided. It was difficult to humanize and connect with the author. Most importantly, I didn’t get the sense the author wrote this book with a sincere intention to help readers better themselves. Today I got the train home from work, put my book and my phone down for 15 minutes and just watched and listened to the rain pattering on the window. I felt so calm. It was an utter joy. Take a leaf out of Gray’s book and be kinder to yourself by appreciating life just as it is – IRISH TIMES

I didn’t expect my quest for the ultimate extraordinary night out to birth an alcohol addiction. If I was bored, I didn’t go home. I drank more, in an attempt to salvage this faceplant of a night. Just one more drink, bar, dance. I didn’t expect to not be able to make a relationship last more than three years. My friends were getting engaged, starting families even, and had climbed on the property ladder thanks to parents handing them deposits, or the bittersweet windfall of inheritance, and in comparison, I felt like the very definition of a loser. On my 27th birthday, my mates made me a birthday book which they all wrote and drew in; all of the doodles of me starred wine and cigarettes. Later that night, I would chip my front tooth by drunkenly falling into a front door. You spend the rest of the night focusing on your shortcomings. But what about all the good things your boss said? Well, you hardly give them a second thought.I was always wanting, striving, seeking the extraordinary, but when I was in the extraordinary, I wanted it to be more extraordinary. I thought people who were happy with their lot were dim nitwits who had had the wool pulled over their eyes, settled for the substandard and would never reach the peaks that I would scale via the crampons of my choosiness. In the book, we’ll combat this negativity bias, and look at all the reasons to be positive instead.

Often when we’re younger, we’re told that getting to a certain level will make us happy. Or achieving a certain goal. Or having a stable marriage, relationships, children…you get the picture. That I felt that camera flash of pain in my gob that tells me I need to go to the dentist – so I went to the dentist. That I can afford to do so, without financial jiggery-pokery and stress.”And one night, I got into a bathtub with a kitchen knife at 3am, inconsolable, and willed myself to do something. I lay there for an hour, until the water was goosebump cold. For that hour, I existed in between two worlds; not wanting to live, yet not being able to do what was necessary to die. So, what's the answer? The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary theorizes that the solution is rediscovering the joy in the ordinary that we so often now forget to feel. Because we now expect the pleasure of a croissant, a hot shower, a yoga class, someone delivering our shopping to our door, we no longer feel its buzz. The joy of it whips through us like a bullet train, without pause. Interesting and joyful. Lights a path that could help us to build resilience against society's urging to compare life milestones with peers - LANCET PSYCHIATRY There are many movie examples used in this book and as a reader I find it lazy. The forced links between movies and ideas reminded me of last-minute high school book reports. Six years ago I was suicidal. When I quit drinking I was still very low so I started researching how to change that. I kept coming up against gratitude and ‘finding beauty in the everyday’, and even though my Britishness was like, ‘that’s way too cheesy and twee for me’, I gave it a go. I joined a gratitude group on Facebook and started writing gratitudes every day and it completely turned my mental health around.