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Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and polymath — student of Plato, teacher of Alexander the Great, and one of the most prolific and influential thinkers in the history of human thought. He wrote on logic, biology, ethics, physics, theater, politics, and metaphysics, and his observations about the natural world were so detailed and patient that he is often called the father of natural science. He found wonder not in the spectacular but in the close examination of ordinary things — a capacity for attention that made even a glass of iced tea, or a summer afternoon, worthy of marvel.

June 10 is National Iced Tea Day, and also Alcoholics Anonymous Founders' Day, marking the 1935 meeting between Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith that launched the organization. Iced tea on a hot June day is one of the simplest pleasures in the world — cold, slightly bitter, slightly sweet, utterly ordinary and utterly satisfying. Aristotle's quote is an invitation to notice that. In the natural act of drinking something grown in the ground, steeped in water, poured over ice that someone had to make — there is, if you pay attention, something of the marvelous. AA Founders' Day also lives in this territory: the marvelous thing is not that recovery is glamorous or easy, but that it is possible, that two men talking honestly in a room in Akron, Ohio, in 1935 could change millions of lives. The marvelous is always closer than we expect.