Remarking on the “pressure to deliver exceptional days,” Kim John Payne laments the loss of ordinary days. Why does it have to be a great day? “If we hold on to the exceptional—if our children adopt that as their measure of success—most will fail, and almost all of them will feel like failures,” he explains. We can’t have “uncommonly good” be our daily ideal. “There’s freedom,” Payne continues, “in embracing the ordinary: freedom, and possibilities.” Children will benefit from stockpiling a whole slew of mundane, uninteresting, routine days. Most of all, though, we will all feel relief when we don’t hold ourselves to the expectation of exceptional days.
