An Ode to Ordinary

I was dipping a chamomile-lavender teabag in my morning cup with a sprinkling of disappointment and irritation. As I started my Sunday, I already know nothing will happen today. All the big plans for ‘me time’, little hobbies, self-care rituals….nothing’s going to happen today. A splendid day of Ghibli-esque sky full of cotton clouds as far as my eyes can see and my internal weather as gloomy as a dose of espresso. No, thank you. I don’t want to feel exhausted today. But I am. And I feel sad about my promise of a day being stolen from me. Didn’t I walk my whole week hoping to reach this glorious Sunday?

Patience of ordinary Things By Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?

How the cup holds the tea,

How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,

How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes

Or toes. How soles of feet know

Where they’re supposed to be.

I’ve been thinking about the patience

Of ordinary things, how clothes

Wait respectfully in closets

And soap dries quietly in the dish,

And towels drink the wet

From the skin of the back.

And the lovely repetition of stairs.

And what is more generous than a window?

Beautiful poem, isn’t it? Humanity’s answers are always found in poems if you ask me, not in dry theories…. Schneider made me look at my window with a newer appreciation. The absolute splendor of living in a house where windows are primarily full of green and blue! I could see the days I would simply treat it  like a wallpaper. Lovely? Repetition? I have spent an unreasonable amount of my life trying to escape repetition. Even my Sunday has plans. It has to be different from Tuesday, otherwise what was the point of waiting for it?

I looked at my cup again. It was doing a perfectly adequate job of holding tea. My Sunday, too, had technically done nothing wrong. It was barely morning. I had accused an entire day of being wasted before it had had a chance to waste itself. Apparently a day cannot merely pass through my life. It has to bring something. Rest, pleasure, painting, embroidery, a book, a long bath, some version of ‘me time’ that will make Monday’s arrival less offensive. Even leisure has deliverables. This was slightly embarrassing to notice.

I wondered how far this goes. There are the obvious versions: after school, after college, after I have money, after I find love, after I leave, after I recover, after I lose weight, after I buy the house. Life arranged in an endless series of antechambers. But perhaps the more interesting version happens at a much smaller scale. After this week, Sunday. After these sessions, rest. After I finish this, I can paint. After I sort myself out, I can enjoy my life. The future keeps receiving privileges the present has somehow failed to earn.

I don’t particularly like where this thought is going because I have no intention of writing an ode to contentment. There are things I want fiercely. I like wanting them. I don’t believe ambition is evidence of some failure to be present, and I would be insufferable if I began greeting dirty dishes as spiritual teachers. Sometimes a dirty dish is just evidence that I was too tired to wash the bloody thing. Schneider’s soap can dry peacefully in its dish; mine occasionally sits in a bathroom that needs cleaning.

Still, the stairs wouldn’t leave me alone. One step after another. The repetition is the function. Remove it and there is no staircase. I began thinking about how much of a life is repetition. Waking, eating, bathing, working, feeding dogs, taking medicines, buying groceries, saying good morning to the same people, locking the same door, walking through the same rooms, going to sleep and, with some luck, waking to do much of it again. Put like that, it sounds intolerably dull. Yet if I remove all of it and retain only what I consider significant, surprisingly little of my life remains. Birthdays, degrees, marriage, divorce, deaths, new jobs, new houses, journeys, the first time, the last time. Tiny islands. What is all the water between them? I think I have been calling it nothing.

Simone Weil came to mind somewhere around here. She wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I have always liked that sentence, perhaps because attention is already close to how I understand love. But I usually think of attention as something offered to another person. I hadn’t thought very much about what it might mean to offer attention to an ordinary Tuesday, or a staircase, or the ten minutes spent waiting for a dog to finish smelling one particular patch of grass.

Immediately I could feel myself trying to turn this into gratitude. That irritated me again. I don’t want to be grateful for every bloody thing. Gratitude has become too much like homework. Five things before bed. Count the blessings. Look on the bright side. There are days when the bright side can mind its own business. Attention feels different, though I am still trying to understand how. Perhaps gratitude already contains a judgement: this is good and I should recognise its goodness. Attention can look without requiring the thing to be good. This morning I am tired. The sky is beautiful. I am irritated. The tea tastes good. My body hurts. A dog is snoring nearby. None of these facts needs to be corrected by another.

Maybe attention is simply refusing to make one experience disappear because another is louder. Iris Murdoch described it as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” I keep getting caught at individual reality. The thing that actually exists, not the thing after I have interpreted it, improved it, fitted it into a theory or compared it with what it should have been. This Sunday, then. Not the Sunday I planned. Not the Sunday I deserved after working all week. Not the Sunday in which I paint and read and take exquisite care of myself. This one. Tired, slightly grumpy, chamomile-lavender Sunday.

That stung a little because I realised how often I look at things through the outline of what they failed to become. Days certainly, perhaps people too, and definitely myself. The self that exists is forever standing beside another version who apparently manages life much better. She is disciplined, energetic, thinner, wiser, organised, creative, financially sensible, spiritually evolved and, I presume, never loses her spectacles. I don’t want to get rid of her completely. Some of what she wants, I want too. But I wonder what happens when the gaze is always tilted towards her. How much of the current life becomes visible only as the distance still left to travel?

This thought wandered, somewhat unexpectedly, into my work. We use very large words in psychotherapy: healing, transformation, integration, recovery. They make me imagine movement, something becoming visibly different. Yet much of the change I witness seems to move in exactly the opposite direction, towards the unremarkable. Someone who has spent years explaining every refusal now says, “No, I can’t today,” and goes on with the afternoon as usual. Someone gets angry and the relationship does not end. A message goes unanswered for a few hours without becoming evidence of abandonment. A mistake remains a mistake instead of expanding into a judgement about the entire self. Someone rests before exhaustion gives permission. Someone has a bad day and does not immediately need to understand what it means.

These things are so small that they could easily pass unnoticed. Perhaps that is what interests me. From outside, almost nothing happened. No breakthrough, no dramatic catharsis, no swelling background music. Yet life may have shifted by three degrees. Three degrees continued over distance takes one somewhere else.

I have often thought of healing as increasing capacity: more awareness, more choice, greater ability to tolerate uncertainty, grief, intimacy, conflict, desire. I still think that. But sitting with all of this on this Sunday, another possibility occurs to me. What does all that increased capacity eventually make possible? Perhaps something remarkably plain. The possibility of having an ordinary life.

Not an untroubled one. I am not sure such a thing exists, and it sounds suspiciously dull anyway. More like a life in which every disturbance does not become an emergency, every feeling does not require action, every silence does not acquire a meaning, every disappointment does not open an older wound and swallow the afternoon. A life capable of returning things to their own scale. An argument can be an argument. Sadness can be sadness. A delayed reply can be a delayed reply. Tuesday can remain Tuesday.

D. W. Winnicott’s wonderfully modest phrase “good-enough mother” comes to mind. He was writing about caregiving, not Sundays, and I am stretching him shamelessly here, but I have always liked the refusal contained in good enough. Not perfect, not optimised, not without failure. Good enough to sustain life and development. I wonder if there is a good-enough day. Perhaps even a good-enough life. The thought feels almost rebellious in a culture where everything, including sleep, hobbies, relationships and morning routines, can be optimised.

Then another uncomfortable connection appears. For someone accustomed to intensity, perhaps ordinary does not immediately feel peaceful. Pain announces itself. Fear certainly does. Desire knows how to make an entrance. Crisis provides instructions: fight, repair, escape, rescue, understand. Peace has terrible marketing. It may arrive simply as nothing is happening. No emergency. Nobody is leaving. Nobody is shouting. Nothing to solve before bedtime. What does one do then? Perhaps one makes tea. Perhaps one gets bored. Perhaps the absence of alarm initially feels suspiciously like emptiness.

That brought me back, annoyingly, to where I began. Nothing is happening today. I had started the morning treating that as the problem. Now I am wondering whether the capacity for nothing to happen may be one of the things human beings spend years trying to recover from.

I don’t want to run too quickly with this thought either. Ordinary life is not automatically benign. Repetition can soothe and repetition can imprison. A quiet house can be peaceful or terribly lonely. Routine can hold a life together or make it unbearable. There have been times when nothing happening did not mean safety at all; it meant waiting for the next thing to happen. I don’t want to put a halo around ordinariness any more than I want to put one around suffering.

What I am becoming curious about is something narrower: my demand that life continuously declare its significance. Why does a Sunday need to be memorable? Why does a hobby become a practice? Why does reading become a reading list? Why does rest need a ritual? Why must an afternoon be well spent? There are only so many Sundays, perhaps that is part of it. Once time becomes visible as finite, wasting it begins to feel almost immoral.

And then mortality enters the room, because apparently my mind cannot leave a cup of tea alone. There will be a last Sunday. A last time I make tea in a particular kitchen, a last time I call a dog by her name, a last ordinary conversation with someone without knowing it is the last. This thought usually comes packaged with an instruction: treasure every moment. I hate that instruction. It makes death into a supervisor. Now I must enjoy Sunday because I am going to die. What an exhausting way to be alive.

But once I throw away the instruction, the fact remains. Repetition isn’t infinite. I don’t have to be grateful for it. I don’t have to notice every instance properly. I certainly don’t have to turn breakfast into a meditation on impermanence. It is simply true that there will be a last time for things whose first time I never thought to record. Somehow that changes the texture without telling me what to feel about it.

Perhaps this is why Schneider’s ordinary things move me. Clothes wait. Soap dries. Towels absorb water. Stairs repeat. The cup holds whatever is poured into it. I know I am anthropomorphising household objects now, but Schneider started it. At first I thought what moved me was their patience. Now I wonder if it is something else. They do not seem to require significance before performing their small function in the world.

I almost wrote that they lack ambition, then stopped. I don’t want a life without ambition. I want to make things, learn things, become better at my work, see what else I can become. Desire has carried me through too much for me to suddenly declare it the enemy. Perhaps what I am reaching for is not lack of ambition but lack of self-rejection. The cup doesn’t have to become a vase before it can hold tea. Ridiculous comparison, perhaps, but I can’t quite dismiss it.

How much of becoming comes from curiosity and how much from the conviction that the current version cannot possibly be enough? I don’t know if those can be cleanly separated. Mine certainly aren’t. I have changed because I loved possibilities and because I could not bear where I was. Sometimes both were true in the same hour.

Maybe enough is not the opposite of wanting more. I have always vaguely heard it that way: enough now, stop wanting, settle down. But perhaps enough belongs to another axis altogether. Perhaps I can want tomorrow without requiring today to apologise for not being there yet.

The tea has gone cold while I have been thinking about all this. My glorious Sunday remains unimpressive. I may paint later. I may not. The hobbies may continue sitting exactly where I left them. There are clouds outside that look painted by someone with an unreasonable affection for Studio Ghibli, and I still feel tired. Nothing has been solved, and I am relieved that nothing has been solved because I didn’t want Sunday to become another lesson either.

The disappointment I began with has shifted slightly, though. I had thought the day was being stolen from me because I wasn’t going to do anything with it. Now I am sitting with the strange assumption hidden inside that sentence: that a day belongs to me only after I have done something worthy with it.

Schneider asks, at the end of her poem, “what is more generous than a window?” I think I understand the question a little differently this morning. A window does not create the view or improve the weather. It doesn’t ask the clouds to become more interesting. It just lets what is there be seen. Perhaps attention does something similar. Not gratitude, not appreciation, not making the ordinary sacred. Just looking long enough for what has become familiar to return to visibility.

I started this morning disappointed that nothing was going to happen. Somewhere between the teabag, Schneider’s stairs, Weil’s attention, Winnicott’s good enough and my own tendency to make a psychological excavation out of breakfast, I have arrived somewhere I wasn’t expecting. Perhaps an ordinary life is not the consolation prize one receives when nothing extraordinary happens. Perhaps much of healing is precisely the slow recovery of the capacity to live one: to have days that do not need rescuing, feelings that do not need resolving, relationships that can survive irritation, and hours that leave no evidence behind.

I am not ready to praise the ordinary quite as obediently as the title suggests. Some of it is boring. Some of it hurts. Some Sundays really are disappointing. I think I only want to stop excluding all of this from the category of my life. Because if I keep waiting for the days on which something happens, I may end up overlooking the alarming amount of my life in which nothing does.

Including, apparently, today.