The magic in the mundane
Most of life seems to be made up of mundane, humdrum, everyday moments. Washing up, commuting to work, cooking tea, separating the recycling.
But if I am just waiting for the spectacular, firework moments I can disdain all the rest of it. This is the trouble with fiction, be it books, TV series or films. All of the exciting stuff is condensed, squeezing out the mundane. I guess going to the loo doesn’t make for good TV though.
How can I find the extraordinary in the ordinary? If it is true that “in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17: 28) then all of life can be significant. Not spectacular necessarily, but significant.
The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.
Fredrich Nietzsche. I recommend reading that through several times.
“How you do anything is how you do everything.” says Joshua Luke Smith in his poem Sunflowers in Babylon. Am I faithful in the small things of life? The seemingly unimportant moments that are forgotten in an instant but constitute a long obedience in the same direction. He champions significant over spectacular.
It’s like a truth that I know but don’t want to acknowledge. A big desire for me is to be a good, faithful father. This, though, includes sleepless nights, clearing up sick, correcting and forgiving, asking forgiveness, setting boundaries
We see this principle in action in all parts of life: the concert musician endlessly practicising scales; the world-record holding marathon runner training and stretching early mornings; the craftsman sanding the wood again and again until it is just right.
This is the complete antithesis of the quick fix, the instant result or the overnight success. It is tortoise-not-hare slow and steady. Deep.
It is formational, hard work and disciplined. Repetitive, focused and … dare I say, boring at times? I hesitate to write this, is it true? The answer must be yes. Continuing in the same direction, following the mundane, will, at times, be boring. It is about incremental progress that can only be seen after a long time.
A long obedience in the same direction. It’s only when you look back that you see how far you’ve come and see the magic in the mundane.
In her book ‘Regrets of the Dying’, Georgina Scull interviewed people who knew they didn’t have long left to live. She says this about those everyday, mundane moments:
In the end, those are the things that seem to mean the most. It’s the day trips to the seaside, the first days at school, the chats over the back fence when we need a laugh or a helping hand. Because these are the stuff of life. And if we value one-off Insta-moments more than moments like this, more than the everyday, we risk not valuing the things that actually matter. And the everyday can be wonderful, if we let it.
What would it take to value, notice and enjoy those small, humdrum moments? The wonderful everyday; the extraordinary ordinary; the magic in the mundane?
