Prompt: “the mundane”

The word “mundane” has French and Latin origins – “mondain”, meaning “of this earth”, and also “clean, elegant”. The modern sense of “dull, uninteresting” is a relatively recent one, from the 1850s. If you look up the current dictionary definition, the old meaning is still considered.

It reminds me of the word “weird” – which now mostly means odd, strange, not-normal, but really originally meant “possessing the power to control fate”. In both cases, it seems like the new meaning is almost a sort of insulting diminishment of the original meaning.

The other thing that comes to mind re: mundane is The Mundanity of Excellence, by Daniel Chambliss. I think the word “mundane” in that context embodies both meanings – excellence is certainly clean and elegant, and “of this earth”… and also remarkably “boring”, “simple” (but not easy!) Chambliss makes the case that excellence isn’t metaphysical or supernatural (which lots of people seem to assume about geniuses – that they’re somehow intrinsically a different, better kind of human than the rest of us) but really just compounded qualitative improvements over time. The Olympic medal is won not through a dramatic burst of inspiration, but from a tedious daily slog that the athlete almost definitely finds rewarding for its own sake.

(A thought I once had that I like to revisit from time to time – when you’re a baby, simply using your finger to touch your nose is an act that requires the development of dexterity, proprioception, self-awareness, nuance. Becoming a concert pianist is simply more of the same – just that most of us are challenged to achieve basic developmental milestones as children, and then stop challenging ourselves to get progressively more skilled at firing a desired combination of neurons in a desired way).

Back to mundanity. Everyday life is mundane. We wake up, we go to the toilet, we eat, we drink, we go about our chores and duties, we go to bed. That’s most of life. Living is mostly this sort of earthy day-to-day series of repeated actions, things that we don’t think very much about. And yet… I think at least some of us yearn for something more than that. “There’s gotta be more to life,” sang Stacy Orrico, “than chasing down every temporary high to satisfy me.” It’s a pretty common motif in lots of stories.

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

“Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.”

I think there was a point in my life where I was very into the idea of trying to seek out “greatness”, seek out a more exalted life, a higher plane of existence. And I think there are certain experiences you can have in life that make it seem like maybe you’re destined for something greater, something more. And yet… having lived a while, I think the reality of reality is mundanity. Does that make sense? Like, life on earth is a life of earth.

“In this world
we walk on the rooftop of hell
gazing at flowers”
– Kobayashi Issa

I guess what I’ve been circling around is… the entire idea that there’s some sort of distinction between the mundane and the not-mundane is entirely in the mind. Young children don’t quite recognize that distinction, I think. They transition from fantasy to reality and back seamlessly.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour”
— William Blake

I think this is it! This is what I’m getting at. I think that, while some experiences can certainly be almost intrinsically more sublime than others – a scenic hike with a great view comes to mind – the real challenge for most people most of the time is to figure out how to see the sublime in the mundane. I remember once having an experience of profound gratitude when I was having lunch at my usual spot near my place – the realization that I am a pattern in space-time, of this universe, and that I was feeding myself, sustaining myself, with food that I bought with money that I obtained from my own labor. I had another similar experience once when I was on a crowded train on the way to work, and for some reason a particular song and scene from a TV show (Radiohead’s Motion Picture Soundtrack, in the Westworld scene “Upstairs”) came to my mind – and I felt this sudden, overwhelming sense of gratitude to musicians and artists throughout the history of humanity, making the effort, to make art, to move each other. And they’ve done this despite having mundane struggles – despite having to eat, having bills to pay. That’s something incredibly exalted to me.

David Foster Wallace talked about this too, in his commencement speech “This Is Water“. He talked about the painful, tedious, frustrating experience of navigating a supermarket crowd after work, when you’re tired – and how, in those moments, it can be really difficult to realize that you have a choice re: how you see the world, how you see your experience. “The automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world”. Default settings that we gradually slip into. I think that’s where mundanity begins.

Mundanity begins when we lose sight of context. That we’re all cosmic beings floating on a speck of dust suspended on a sunbeam, hurtling through space. That even being able to see, and think, and communicate with other people – all of that is incredibly profound. Being able to eat, being able to think, me being able to write this, you being able to read it – all of it is staggeringly the opposite of “dull, uninteresting”. It only seems that way sometimes because we might not have a sense of context. Once you teach yourself how to contextualize things in an interesting way, you’ll never be bored again.