Wake at 6:30. Dress in “hanging out” clothes, as Dalia calls them. Feed Nutmeg wet food and go to computer to check overnight and early morning mail. Feed her Temptations in kitchen and return to computer. Take my pills. Go to elevator to retrieve newspapers. Put sports section aside for breakfast reading but do Jumbles to get brain going. Prepare breakfast.
My day – and yours – consists of a series of routines that look like this, dispersed between new experiences that are not a part of established patterns engraved on your neural pathways. The repeated strands consume minimal brain power, leaving the balance for more challenging activities. In addition, there’s something calming about checking the unchanging boxes, an implication that order still prevails in an otherwise chaotic world.
Enacting these almost religious rituals takes place in fixed settings – the bedroom in which your wife is still sleeping, despite the blaring radio alarm; the kitchen where the pots from last night’s dinner are still soaking in the sink; the baby blue freight elevator where some kind neighbor has placed the morning papers; the computer room where yesterday’s printouts still sit in the printer’s arms.
In moving among these settings, we encounter an array of familiar objects – the pot inherited from my mother’s kitchen in which I boil water for our morning cereal, the large straw basket next to the breakfast table into which we toss the completed sections of our print edition newspapers.
But what happens when all these elements of a humdrum life are suddenly yanked from your landscape? That’s one of the questions that has haunted me since I read Prophet Song by Paul Lynch to which I devoted a posting a few weeks ago. The book contains this striking line: “Happiness hides in the humdrum.” I didn’t refer to it at the time because my focus then wasn’t on the book’s language, but on its overall message about the way in which a democratic society could evaporate at warp speed.
The book follows the rapid deconstruction of all the familiar structures of society in what appears to be modern-day Ireland, in the process upending the habits and routines that constitute so much of the characters’ day-to-day living. The citizens of this fictional Ireland are being forced to abandon the lives to which they have become accustomed, particularly if they stand in opposition to the oppressive new government. Every aspect of their previously predictable lives is stripped away. Gone are not just the stable aspects of home life but the diversions of work, school and recreation; what remains is anxiety, uncertainty, fear. The elements of one’s life that seem boring, not worthy of mention, are the parts that the characters long for, as would we if they were suddenly gone.
It’s easy to recognize in this scenario the plight of the millions of refugees who have been uprooted, by choice or by force, from their familiar lives. When I see the photos of Gazans on the move from one supposedly protected area to another with nothing more than a bicycle and several sacks of what remains of their past lives, I’m overwhelmed by what has been lost. In Sudan, there are millions of displaced citizens whose lives have been stolen from them. Closer to home, my own parents gave up their familiar lives with nothing but candlesticks and a goose feather quilt from that past. I can’t imagine what that felt like, what courage it took, as it has for the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have flooded our country in recent years, fleeing from poverty and violence from places where they would prefer to stay, if only the conditions there were livable.
This abandonment of the ordinary is not an issue that is remote in time and place for me. As we contemplate the possibility of having to leave our home for the kind of retirement community living that so many friends and relatives have opted for, I am continually weighing the losses that would come with such a move. All those routines I described in the opening would have to be abandoned. So many of the familiar objects I wander among in our apartment that bear the markings of the life we’ve made together – the Tunisian urn we bought in a town on the coast of Sicily, the hand made giraffe we bought in a South African township, the grand piano we bought from our landlord in New Hampshire, not to mention all the books that are the building blocks of our thinking lives. We’ve watched the painful choices people have had to make as their living space shrinks.
So, in the end, this is a plea and a reminder to celebrate the ordinary in our lives, all the things around us that protect us from chaos, but which are largely invisible to us until we face the danger of losing them. Happiness hides in the humdrum.
