The Priceless Value of Common Things – Sunday, November 08, 1981
Some of the things we value most in life—though we might not always realize it—are the most common. It prompted one author to observe, “Genius is recognizing the uniqueness in the unimpressive. It is looking at a homely caterpillar, an ordinary egg and a selfish infant, and seeing a butterfly, an eagle and a saint.”1
Well, that may be the essence of genius, and if it is, then we were all born with a bit of genius. It is the natural curiosity and imagination that makes a child stare at a bug or watch the clouds drift by—little touches that are common to us all when we’re young.
Unfortunately, as we grow older our world usually becomes more complicated and in the process, we lose sight of some of life’s most valuable and lovely things.
Artists, poets, composers and other creative people make a lifestyle of digging deeper into the sights and sounds that most of us pass over as being too common to concern us. Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote, “The commonplaces are the great poetic truths.”2 And poet Robert Frost wrote of birch trees bending or of a quiet fork in the forest road and drew from them marvelous symbolism and messages for mankind.
Each of us can partake of these creative experiences if we will sensitize our spirits to the goodness and beauty in the world about us.
Perhaps in no area of our lives do we need this appreciation for the common things as much as we do in our relationships with each other. It is often the common things people do that make them uncommon, special, caring and appreciated. It is their common care and concern for everyone that makes them uncommon.
And so, for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to feel, the common things and so-called common people of this world are in reality a multitude of little miracles waiting for us to discover such discoveries that might be of greatest value and bring us the greatest peace.
1 Reader’s Digest. October 1981, p. 77.
2 Robert Lewis Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston, quoted in The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, Penguin Books, New York, 1960, p, 375,
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November 08, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,726