I don’t believe in the idea of an “everyday thing.” Each night, the moon offers a new face. Each day, the sun burns with a different intensity. Nothing in this life repeats itself exactly.
To call anything “everyday” is to flatten the world — to overlook its subtleties, its constant evolution. It’s the hallmark of a society dulled by repetition, numbed to the quiet wonder woven into ordinary moments. When we start labeling things as routine, we stop really seeing them.
When I moved to Arizona, I became fascinated with the red rocks. They were everywhere. On trails, near highways, even scattered in parking lots outside grocery stores. Locals laughed at me for collecting them. But to me, these weren’t just “everyday” rocks. Back where I grew up, the stones were gray and heavy, dense metamorphic slabs without the fiery streaks of iron and clay I found in Arizona. Each red rock felt like a fragment of the earth’s memory, a relic shaped by eons of heat, water and wind.
Nothing is just surface-level — not when you pause, step outside yourself, and really pay attention. The world is a living mosaic of difference and detail, whispering its stories to anyone willing to listen. There is no such thing as ordinary. There is only the depth we choose to notice.
— Emily Hedegard is a Masters of Investigative Journalism student in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. She is originally from Saco, Maine.