#1: Dirty Hands…and how they triggered the idea of this blog

Through a good friend, I was introduced to take a pottery class. I was very curious if I would like this trade or not, without any illusion that I would actually create something worth to keep. It was more about the experience what it feels to create something out of mud then the actual object. What I liked most about it was to get my hands dirty. The clay felt amazing on my hands and I loved to just dig my fingers and fingernails in it. I realized that it has been decades since I didn’t get my hands that dirty and enjoyed it immensely.

Some weeks later, I travelled to rural Tanzania and spent my days with local farmers who get their hands dirty every day, from morning to evening. Seeing their dirty hands while working in the field triggered something in my brain and I felt this rush of a XORDINARY déjà-vu. While it is an extraordinary moment of pleasure for me to get my hands dirty with pottery, this is the ordinary daily life of millions of people who possibly believe that spending days with clean hands is way more extraordinary. And it hit me there and then: the extraordinary and the ordinary are the same thing, it only depends on the point of view one takes to look at them.

This led to the inspiration to write about this phenomenon and voilà, the idea of the blog was born right there. I always assumed that the extraordinary was something special, something grandiose, something rare. It was right then and there that I realized that this was not the case, and that the extraordinary was right there in front of me all the time, that I just needed to open my eyes and let them take a different point of view to see it. We are surrounded by media who tries to sell us the extraordinary in form of famous people who live and do the extraordinary. While this can be one version of the extraordinary, depending from what angle you look at it, I believe that the much more interesting extraordinary lies in ordinary people, the “everyday heroes”, the ones who surround me everywhere I am and go. Or the situations and moments that might seem like nothing special but when you consider them from a different perspective, it strikes you that the real extraordinary lies in them.

Looking consciously for these extraordinary people and moments surrounding me gives me the opportunity to take a break from my busy life, to reflect, and to just absorb all that comes my way. And to always stay curious enough to look at people and situations with a new angle to find the extraordinary in them.

Since then, I have gone back to pottery class twice more. And the experience was even more intense the second and third time, thanks to the fact that I felt that this was an extraordinary moment of my life, to be treasured by the second and just enjoyed in silence. And even more stunning, the piece that came out of these classes is actually quite extraordinary for a pottery apprentice (though lots of gratitude also goes to my extraordinarily patient pottery teacher).