#122: Sunlight, not fireworks.
Remembering to appreciate "ordinary" love.
The Luminist is a reader-supported publication that illuminates the pain, the pleasure, and the paradox on the path to technicolor living. Subscribe below to receive posts about how loss teaches us to get the most out of life (along with silly gifs) in your inbox every Saturday.
"Hey, Sue, come here, I need your face."
It was 7am on a winter Sunday so bright it hurt my eyes. Richie my brother-in-law was downloading the garage door opener app onto my phone. He held the rectangle up to my face. I fixed my thousand-mile stare until the checkmark swirled into view.
"We're in!"
Then without fanfare he finished setting it up so I wouldn't have to run through the blustery cold to the garage panel to get into the Treehouse. So I could stay in the warmth of my car.
This is love.
Not the kind that makes it into Valentine's Day commercials. But the kind that actually makes my life better.
We're taught to look for love in the flashy, shiny places.
The surprise proposal. The candlelit dinner. The diamond anything.
But these are just the marketing campaign for love, not the actual product.
Real love hides in plain sight — in gestures so ordinary we barely notice them. The partner who refills your water bottle without being asked. The friend who remembers you hate cilantro so leaves it on the side of their potluck guacamole. The colleague who quietly adjusts the meeting time knowing you have a long commute.
Nothing says "I love you" like making someone's life better in ways they'll never post on Instagram.
The gesture I remember most came on an ordinary Tuesday. Eight-year-old Kendall and I were in the garage, buckling up for errands. Mike came out to say goodbye and noticed the windshield was splattered with bugs.
"Wait, hold on." He ran back inside.
He emerged seconds later with Windex and paper towels. He stepped onto the running board and leaned forward, scrubbing away each splatter with quiet determination.
While he worked on the other side of the glass, I turned to catch Kendall's eye.
"Listen, this is important. Flowers are nice and everything, but this is what you want in a partner, in the person you love. Someone who will clean the bugs off your windshield."
It took losing Mike to fully see what had been there all along.
Because when my world imploded in 2016, a dozen roses wouldn't have fixed a damn thing. But I would have given anything for one more moment of watching him clean those bugs, noticing him refill my coffee, feeling him kiss the top of my head as he passed by my desk.
Grief has a way of stripping everything down to the studs. Suddenly you see the hidden support beams that were holding everything up. All those small, forgettable moments were actually the infrastructure of your life… You discover the most beautiful truth and the most painful one simultaneously: life's meaning was never in the milestones. It was always in the mundane.
It reminds me of a concept I’ve talked about before: the “radiance in dailiness”. I stole the term from author Don DeLillo. He mentioned it in an interview about his cult classic White Noise, referencing the miracles hidden in “ordinary” reality. Originally the quote made me think of how my five senses were sharpened and enlivened when I emerged from my grief pit: being awe-struck by the baby soft texture of spring leaves or the diamond droplets of dew that I could stare into for hours.
But arguably the biggest sense organ of all is our hearts.
Looking back, I see that my heart, cracked wide open by loss, became exquisitely sensitive to the thousand quiet ways people showed they cared. Like a tuning fork suddenly calibrated to detect the gentlest vibrations of kindness.
These everyday acts of love still warm me years later:
Ken leaving a Pellegrino on my desk without a word.
Mom tackling the most tedious job in existence, putting away our Christmas decorations, without being asked.
Takis appearing in my driveway like a guardian angel in human form, insisting we were heading to the ER when I threw my back out.
We can argue parents are obligated, husbands must, brother-in-laws should. But actually, no. Nobody owes us anything beyond the bare minimum.
When someone does these small things without thinking, that's love so embedded it's become instinct. Each gesture alone might seem insignificant. Together, they're everything.
When we develop the habit of noticing these everyday expressions of love, something shifts. Ordinary days reveal their extraordinary nature. Mundane interactions become sacred. Even the hardest times feel more bearable because we recognize the skinny but strong threads of affection that we continue to wrap around each other.
The grand gestures are fireworks — spectacular but fleeting. The small acts of love are sunlight — unremarkable while actually sustaining life.
So if my mission is to help others live INTO their one wild and precious life, what actually gets you there?
Part of the recipe has got to be this: opening your eyes to love in its humble disguises.
It’s given me two gifts I can't get anywhere else:
First, the actual comfort from each small act — the warmth of the car on a winter morning, the cold Pellegrino on a hot afternoon, help with errands when I can’t bend over. But even more powerful is the cumulative effect — the awareness that I am supported by a web of love, woven through seemingly mundane acts of care.
In a world obsessed with the extraordinary, there is quiet revolution in honoring the ordinary ways we tend to each other.
Maybe the most meaningful life doesn’t rely on grand romantic gestures, or epic accomplishments, or life-changing adventures. Maybe it just requires giving and receiving love in its everyday work clothes, showing up and making life better in a thousand unremarkable ways.
To noticing what’s already there,
It’s crazy. I wrote on this point in my journal just yesterday. This is my favorite part of what you wrote:
Looking back, I see that my heart, cracked wide open by loss, became exquisitely sensitive to the thousand quiet ways people showed they cared. Like a tuning fork suddenly calibrated to detect the gentlest vibrations of kindness.
One night, while still in my own grief pit, I blithely wrote on Facebook that I wished I had some Doritos. I don’t eat much junk food so there wasn’t even a poor facsimile in my house. The next morning I found stacks of Doritos bags at my door. It’s one of the greatest gestures of love I’ve ever experienced.
Nice post