Observing The Ordinary to Find The Extraordinary

“You can’t find diamonds without finding a ton of dirt and rocks in the process.”?

The world is a rich tapestry. There are 7.8 billion people at the time of this article, each with their personality, preferences, and even how they’ll handle a particular situation. (Population, 2020) Everything is ‘extraordinary’ in one sense, yet everything is also ordinary.?

Extraordinary situations are all those events or happenings that affect you or those around you, not a drastic change in weather on the other side of the world. As selfish as that may sound, self-awareness is, after all, about knowing yourself and the things around you.?

However, when looking for extraordinary events, you will also have to look at ordinary events around you, which is why you notice your surroundings. Now, you get to pick and choose; that is the difficult part.?Difficult, yet doable.?

Let’s consider the example of chess. Even if you haven’t played chess before, you must know that the queen is one of the most powerful units on the board. While she won’t be of much use, either, without the rest, the other player’s cage gets rattled for a minute when the queen moves. You know the other person has a plan if they move their queen.?However, move that queen repeatedly or predictably, such as when under threat, the move becomes ordinary.?

One of the most ‘out of the ordinary moves people make when playing chess is sacrificing their queen. The sacrifice usually means something, usually a trap. Now, once you see someone sacrificing a queen, you know something’s up, right? You scan the whole board to see what and where the trap is set. Even if you do kill the queen, you will be wary, waiting for something to go wrong after it.?

A good move at this point would be to take your time with the next move and plan ahead. Look at the board, see what the other person is up to and try to find why they did what they did. Even if the idea was to get one of your pawns out of the way, make sure that pawn wasn’t the only thing standing between a checkmate. Plan a few moves; if your opponent plays this, you play that, they move there, you move here, etc.?

You must do that in real life, too; prepare for everything but focus on things out of the ordinary.?

Remember, something that you deal with regularly will be easier to deal with, so if everyday things come up to mess with you, you will at least have an idea of what you need to do. Extraordinary events, however, are new and require special consideration to be dealt with.?