I am in awe of the mundane. I wish to pick up the baton from Thornton Wilder and champion the cause for celebrating the small and seemingly inconsequential in every day life. When I first read Our Town in high school it mesmerized me and after looking at some of the critical essays on it recently, the brilliance of the play shows itself again. One shouldn't attempt to guess an author's intent, especially a long-dead one, but it seems obvious in this case.

Wilder had it right. No one truly grasps the rapid passage of time nor lives every moment, and we waste time like we waste words, foolishly thinking as if our supply of both is infinite.

People tell me that I look much younger than my age (when I don't have a big beard) and I attribute that to several things, one of them my ability to find joy in the simple things. I can get excited over tiny, silly, little frivolous things, such as getting a great coupon in the mail to Dunkin' Donuts (for example, I had a particularly horrible day this week when nothing went right until I stopped by a D&D with a coupon for a travel mug. The two ladies working let me chose the awesome blue $8.95 stainless steel mug and filled it with their incredible coffee and only charged me the coupon price of $2.99. When that happened I finally slowed myself down, thanked them profusely, and smiled.) Great coffee makes me use interjections with abandon. I have a great time cooking. Today I made shredded pork from a roast and it was marvelous. When I hike I sometimes stop and stare at interesting or huge trees (Dan always lightly scoffs at me for this). I love the smell of fresh cut grass and the awed silence of an empty trail.

Oh, and have you ever run your bare feet through plush, soft carpeting? Or let the aroma of freshly made flavored coffee waft through your home as your read the Sunday paper?

I make a concentrated effort to appreciate the times I do have with friends and family, and I think of each occasion when we gather in love and laughter as something remarkably special. A few weeks ago some old college friends went to a hockey game, watched a movie, ate horrible food, and laughed for hours. There is nothing better than the comfort we share in those moments and I force myself to recognize that before all the moments pass and the night closes.

Still, I waste too much time. The critics say that Wilder wrote about how people never see the transience in every day activities like seeing one's family in the morning, sitting down for a meal together, and the meaningless chatter among people passing in the streets. It is precisely these connections that humans make to each other that brings out the divine in us, and that gives us transience, and most of us fail to recognize it every day.

I think that human beings are not the ultimate example of intelligent life but merely another cog in a wheel much too large for our comprehension, thus rendering Wilder's implied religious faith in some sort of higher power moot and infantile, perhaps. Still, each day with breath and thought and movement is the greatest of all gifts, and each moment therein deserves zealous worship.