The Chapters We Skip: Why We Rush Through the Ordinary Pages and Miss the Whole Point

We are always rushing toward the next chapter. The child wants to be a teenager. The teenager wants to be an adult. The young adult wants to be established. The established adult wants to retire. The retired person looks back and wonders where the time went. We live our lives leaning forward, straining toward the future, convinced that the good part is just ahead—the next milestone, the next achievement, the next stage when everything will finally feel right.

But life does not happen in the chapters we are rushing toward. It happens in the chapters we are living through, the ordinary ones, the ones we barely notice because we are so focused on what comes next. The Tuesday evening when no one had anywhere to be. The conversation in the car on the way to school. The rain against the window on a lazy Sunday. These are not the chapters that make it into the highlight reel. They are not the ones we will tell our grandchildren about. But they are the ones that, accumulated, become the whole of a life.

We skip these chapters at our peril. Not because they are exciting—they are not, by definition. But because they are where we actually live. The big moments—weddings, graduations, promotions, births—are punctuation marks. They stand out because they are rare. The sentences between them, the paragraphs that fill the pages, are the ordinary days. And if we are not present for those days, we are not present for our own lives. We are waiting for a future that never arrives, because when it does, it becomes the present, and we start waiting again.

I think about my grandmother, who lived to be ninety-seven. In her final years, I would visit and ask about her life—the big events, the dramatic stories. She would tell them, patiently, but her eyes lit up most when she spoke of ordinary things. The taste of tomatoes from her father's garden. The sound of rain on the tin roof of the house where she raised her children. The way her husband hummed while he shaved. The smell of bread baking on Saturday mornings. These were not the chapters she had been told to remember. They were the chapters she had actually lived.

She taught me something I have never forgotten, though I forget to practice it constantly. She taught me that the life we are living right now—this moment, this ordinary Tuesday, this cup of coffee, this conversation—is not preparation for something better. It is the thing itself. The chapter we are in, however mundane it seems, is someone's whole world. It is the only chapter we are guaranteed. And if we are not here for it, we are not here at all.

The difficulty is that ordinary chapters do not feel significant while we are in them. They feel like waiting. They feel like the space between the real events. We are conditioned to think this way—by stories that skip the boring parts, by culture that celebrates achievement over presence, by our own restless minds that prefer anticipation to attention. We need a kind of reeducation, a remembering that the ordinary is not the enemy of the meaningful but its container.

Consider the chapter you are in right now. Not the one you wish you were in, not the one you are planning for, not the one you are recovering from. This one. This day. This hour. What is actually here? Not what is missing, not what is wrong, not what you are waiting for. What is present? The warmth of the room. The sound of your own breathing. The weight of your body in the chair. The fact that you are alive, reading these words, capable of experiencing this moment. This is the chapter. This is the life. This is it.

The practice of being present in ordinary chapters is not complicated, but it is difficult. It requires us to resist the pull of the future, the tug of regret, the habit of distraction. It requires us to notice what is actually here, rather than what we wish were here. It requires us to find the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary—the way light falls on a familiar surface, the sound of someone you love breathing in sleep, the taste of food prepared with care, the simple miracle of being alive on a planet spinning through space.

These are not small things. They are everything. The chapters we skip are the only chapters there are. The life we are not present for is the life we do not live.

There is a story I love about a monk who was asked what he did before enlightenment. He said, "I chopped wood and carried water." And what did you do after enlightenment? "I chopped wood and carried water." The difference was not in the activity but in the presence. Before, he was waiting for something else. After, he was fully here, in the ordinary, in the only place any of us ever really are.

We do not need enlightenment to practice this. We need only to remember, again and again, that the chapter we are in is not a bridge to somewhere better. It is the destination. The promotion, if it comes, will bring its own ordinary days. The relationship, if it arrives, will include countless moments of nothing special. The achievement, if achieved, will be followed by another Tuesday. There is no chapter after which everything becomes extraordinary. There is only the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary, waiting to be noticed.

The elderly woman in the armchair, looking out the window at the bird on the feeder—she knows this. She has lived enough chapters to understand that the ones she once rushed through were the ones that mattered most. The photo album on her lap holds the big moments, the documented events, the things she thought worth recording. But her smile is not for them. It is for the bird, the light, the simple fact of being here, in this moment, alive to it. This is the wisdom that comes from living all the way through, not just skipping to the end.

The chapters we skip are waiting for us. They are not demanding. They do not announce themselves as important. They simply are—the Tuesday evenings, the car conversations, the rain against the window, the ordinary miracle of being alive. They ask nothing except our presence. They offer nothing except themselves. And they are, in the end, the whole point.

So here is the question that matters, the only question that ever really matters: Where are you right now? Not where do you wish you were. Not where are you going. Where are you, in this actual moment, in this actual chapter, in this actual life? Can you feel the air on your skin? Can you hear the sounds around you? Can you notice that you are here, alive, capable of experiencing this moment? This is the chapter. This is the life. This is it.

The rest is waiting. The future will come or it won't. The next chapter will begin when this one ends. But this one, right now, is the only one you have. Do not skip it. Do not rush through it. Do not wish it away. Be here, fully, for this ordinary, extraordinary, irreplaceable moment. It will never come again. And it is everything.