Make a personal inventory of your everyday routines and determine which ones are the least important. Do they include taking out the trash, dusting your furniture, reading junk mail, throwing your pen into the air and catching it, placing your dirty clothes in a special place, filling your car with gas, purchasing a soft drink, taking the dog for a walk, or removing lint from your clothes? When you have identified several of these routines, make some plans to tinker, experiment, and fool around with them in order to help bring forth some surprise and wonder.

If you choose the routine of taking out the trash, consider how you can alter this activity. You could change the time you do it, perhaps shifting it from being a morning task to being a late-evening outing. Or you could alter the place where you keep the trash, or make a difference in how you carry it, release it, look at it, think about it, and feel about it. What if you recited a special limerick to your trash before throwing it away or gave it a parting gift? Imagine asking your trash if it had any last requests before it left your house and then allow yourself to free-associate on what it might say if it were able to talk. Would it ask to have another night inside the house or be fed a final meal?

As you fool around with your least important routines, begin seeing this as a safe laboratory for finding ways of introducing more and crazy wisdom into your life. Begin wondering whether these least important routines will someday become more important because of the freshness you now are bringing to them. How could taking out the trash become a ceremonial act that helps you enter a sacred space? Would it require changing your trash can into an altar for objects that are passing on to a new life? Would you start blessing your trash and thanking it for what it brought you?

These questions and orientations help bring an absurd hint of mystery and wonder into your everyday life. The secrets of spirituality are not necessarily revealed through entering golden or pearly gates. When the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary, we bring a sense of wonder and enchantment into the world.

Bradford Keeney in Everyday Soul