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
Our unconscious organizing principles most clearly reveal themselves when we find ourselves stuck, imagining that our happiness is conditional on having a certain kind of experience, on being or becoming a certain kind of person, or on being treated in some special manner. …Practice allows us discover that our happiness is not dependent on any of the things which we once thought so crucial. The old organizing principles that forever were warning us, “Do it this way or else!” are suddenly found irrelevant. Life offers us the unexpected pleasure in our own aliveness, vitality and responsiveness. Being just this moment, we learn that we don’t have to become anything new, or somehow jettison all those shameful parts of ourselves in order to partake of this newfound bounty. 
We live within a continuum of action and result, in which whatever we do while conscious of doing it leaves a result in the mind. These results may be experienced as the reactions and responses of others, or as effects on our physical well-being, but the deepest result is mental. That is, our actions have a psychological and emotional result that shapes our minds. After all, this is the way we learn: we do something and from the results – from the feedback that other people or our bodies or our own minds give us – we notice whether that action gave us well-being or pain. Through contact, that feedback gets lodged as a memory, a perception or felt meaning. It’s a detail on our psychological road map of how to proceed through life. That detail, a memory, or a piece of behaviour becomes one strand in the weave of our identity. That’s how your mind gets shaped, for good or for ill. And one result ….is the sense of self.
Mindfulbalance 