The Mundane Mysteries of Everyday Life

The everyday can be exotic as well if you look at it with fresh eyes

Don’t places and people strike you as odd sometimes? Even your neighbors and the local areas that you visit constantly might appear quite peculiar once you give them a thorough look. Why is that so?

From a very young age, I was intensely captivated by ancient cultures, such as Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Japan, and China. The people in the movies, their hairstyles, manners, dresses… The landscapes and the architecture… It all seemed mystical, magical, and awe-inspiring. We human beings have a very keen attraction to the exotic, the foreign, the other, the unknown. At moments it seems that we might find something there which we lost long ago — a deep-rooted interest, a mystery, a story never told, and never heard before.

As a kid and teen I watched films, cartoons, read books, and later on — even had a possibility to visit some of the above-mentioned places. Unfortunately, I could only see them in their contemporary forms, as I don’t possess the ability to travel through time …not yet! People there were quite different than the ones acting out in my mind, and the sceneries were not as I had pictured them, but that was not a problem, they still remained close and distant, known and unknown, local and foreign. The changing surroundings, people, and scenery gave me a chance to lose and find myself again and again, and I am forever grateful for that.

We humans, just like the rest of nature, are a constant flux, and traveling reminds us of that. But we don’t have to travel far to notice that. Sometimes it’s enough to walk around the neighborhood, or simply to look at the exterior of our homes and the interior of our minds. Gems are to be found everywhere. The only problem is that over time we lose the capacity to notice, as our brains become dull and incapable of finding these wonders anymore. This is the consequence of our repetitive lifestyles and thought patterns. Over time we start becoming inattentive to our surroundings, because of our firmly put but false belief, that we have them mapped out. But the map is not the territory! And this is the mistake we make constantly — confusing symbols with facts that they are trying to represent.

As talked before in the previous post, the past intrudes the present through that which we call memory. Because of memory everything seems to be figured out, known, and familiar. As result, our brain filters out all the unnecessary and mundane aspects of life, which we already feel to know, or at least we think we do. But what do we actually know? Do we know ourselves? Do we know others? Do we know our surroundings? Everything is always shifting, never standing still, and impossible to box out with firm categories. As the dark philosopher of Greece, Heraclitus has put “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

So why don’t we pay attention? Why do we always look towards the exotic, the other? Have we become so insensitive that we can’t see the beauty of life in our everyday surroundings, on the faces of our neighbors, on the straws of grass that are leaning towards the sun when young and falling back to earth once dry? How do we become so foreign to everything? Is it because we don’t have roots that are firmly planted to the ground, we feel that we are separate from the rest of nature? Or is it because we tend to forget, that the mundane and the sacred are not diametrically opposed, just like up and down are not fundamentally opposed to one another? What happens if we zoom out from the land on which we are standing to the cosmos at large? Where is “up” and where is “down”?

Of course, all these commentaries might seem like a critique of visiting new places, but I am to assure you that there is nothing wrong with traveling and exploring. I don’t want to preach about the absolute necessity for a homeland, or about how people should love the flag. Nationalistic identities and beliefs do not interest me. All I want is to bring attention back to the ordinary, to the everyday, to that tree you pass by without a close inspection every morning, to that woman from the third floor who has unusually laid-out freckles, to the birds that dance around your window when you are drinking a warm beverage, and most importantly, to all those pieces of plastic which are rolling around on the streets without the slightest sense of guilt or knowledge of being there.

Being is weird and existence is odd, and we shouldn’t forget that. The mundane is a mystery, just as much as the distant, and if we have the possibility to travel and explore — that’s great, but let’s not forget what T.S. Eliot was alluding to in his famous Four Quartets. As he stated in the “Little Gidding”:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”

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