Day #026

Day #026:

Edinburgh, Scotland

I sit in this café along the Royal Mile. Outside, throngs of couples, families, and locals navigate countless street performers and sidewalk stalls – all of whom are competing against the attention-grabbing beauty of Edinburgh.

A light mist descends on the cobblestones – but instead of frustration, it provides a strange sense of delight for the crowd. No frows – only smiles. Laughter.

The type of joy that can’t be orchestrated or choreographed. It’s simple. It’s genuine.

I sip my tea. Warm my hands against the hot cup. Take one last look outside…

And I think to myself: I’m going to remember this moment for the rest of my life.

The color of the sky. The faint wind drifting lazily through the street. The jackets, faces, and bags of the passerbys. I imagine the sound bouncing off the medieval walls like music. All of it – a still frame now etched into my memory.

A permanent fixture bringing a smile to my face. A warmth to my soul.

When I was younger, this type of image would have evaporated from my memory. Maybe a small footnote in the day. The small but beautiful, the seemingly innocuous but charming – these moments rarely commanded my attention.

I was too focused on the big and bold, accomplishments and celebrations. I didn’t yet understand or appreciate that wonder wasn’t something you had to chase. It wasn’t an outcome or destination.

It was already present in every fleeting frame of life.

For years, schools taught me a lot about conscience – mostly the ways I was probably sinning with mine. But I learned very little about consciousness until I began traveling throughout Asia, immersing myself in various studies on the topic. That deeper awareness – the flow, the sense of connection with the present moment – is not perfection or Zen mastery.

It's simply noticing. Opening the eyes. Savoring.

Letting the universe open its palm and invite you to step on.

The challenge, however, is that in today’s world, we’re trained to ignore this. We sit in boardrooms and offices lit by fluorescent lights. We shuffle from Zoom call to Zoom call.

We measure our days and time in deliverables, milestones, and KPI scorecards.

Life has been reduced to a grind with nicknames like Sunday Scaries and Monday Blues.

Somewhere along the way, we decided work was a chore rather than a green field – that the moments between meetings, spent focused on the task, weren’t worthy of beauty.

And yet, the micro-moments of Corporate America exist there too. A colleague’s laugh over coffee. The satisfaction of learning from your peers – solving something hard and challenging that at one point seemed like Sisyphean.

Sunlight through office windows. The view from the top of the skyscraper. The collaboration that forms a shared raison d’etre.

Even work has its own ecosystem of beauty and joy and flow. It can be full of wonder, if we learn to look closely.

The problem is not that beauty disappears in the workplace – it’s that we forgot how to notice it.

Curiosity has always been my quiet superpower. I love to learn for the sake of knowledge; I love to experience for the sake of adding to life’s multi-colored mosaic.

And after years of chasing the extraordinary, I’ve grown most grateful for the ordinary.

Leaves turning in autumn. Waves collapsing on a shoreline. Snow tumbling down mountain peaks. A child’s laughter ringing through a plaza. Two elderly lovers holding hands. Someone quietly working at their craft.

These are the ecosystems we live in – the miraculous threads of a world that’s aways singing to us, if only we’d stop long enough to listen.

And so I smile. I open my ears. And I daydream of my dad’s tweed jacket.