or·di·nar·y/ˈôrdnˌerē/ Adjective: With no special or distinctive features; normal.
The Catholic liturgical tradition has long divided time in two: There are two kinds of days in life and two periods of the year. The days were either feast days or ferial days. The year was divided into “ordinary” time and …well, “extra-ordinary” time, I guess. This second segment of the year, come to think about it, I never heard anyone name at all. It was a number of times: Advent, Lent, the Christmas, Easter and Pentecost seasons. This kind of information may be boring stuff but it’s important stuff, too. Ordinary time, you see, was the longest period of all. It was the time when life went its long, dull way, predictable to the ultimate. Monday, we did the laundry; Tuesday, we did chapel, altar breads, and house-cleaning; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday we did it all again. More of the same. Same old, same old. Week after week, month after month, year after year.
Every once in a while, of course, life was punctuated by a feast day with its special meals and polyphonic liturgies but, in the end, the normal, the daily predominated. As it does for all of us yet. The commute, the paperwork, the housework, the school run, eat up day after day with mind-numbing regularity. And yet, it is in “ordinary” time that the really important things happen: our children grow up, our marriages and relationships grow older, our sense of life changes, our vision expands, our soul ripens. No doubt about it, [my father’s] prayer card was right: To lose the glory of ordinary time is to suffer the loss of the greater part of life.
Joan Chittister, Ordinary Time
Work can be fast and relentless: pressing deadlines, looming goals, endless meetings; email, phone calls, “to do” lists. At times we can feel out of control, as if driving a car with no breaks, rushing through our jobs holding onto difficult turns, cutting corners, racing through an occasional red light. We might even say to ourselves at the end of the day: “Hey, what just happened – I just spent my whole day at a job without noticing any of it!”….When we are mindful of our job’s speed and hecticness, we take a subtle step: we actually slow down in order to notice how fast we are going. By simply observing the speed mindfully, we have tapped the breaks, so to speak, and slowed down just a bit. 
Awareness of sensations is considered the first foundation of mindfulness because whatever we experience — feelings, emotions, thoughts and sensory perceptions — also arise as sensations in our body. When mindful of our body, we open to the changing stream of sensations without grasping or resistance. The experience might be fear or joy, it might be the intensity of aliveness, or it might be numbness. ….This mindfulness is not a distanced kind of witnessing. […] we should “observe sensations within sensations.” This means not imagining our hand, for instance, but actually directly feeling from the inside the energy that is our hand, as it is in any given and changing moment. We are training to experience the body from the inside out.
I have heard it said that 90 percent of getting along well in life is in showing up for it. I’d add to that thought – showing up fully in each moment. Being present is not just present in body alone but in body and clear mind…We may acknowledge at some level that all the moments in our lives are teachers, but we don’t always want to meet the teacher., so we seek sometimes to control or regulate our experience in a variety of ways. If we have any hope of being free from the habitual swings of our reactions, if we have any wish to live more openly and freely, if we see to, as writer Barbara Kingsolver says “look life in the eye and love it back” then we need to take a look at what is clouding our view.
