The Grandeur of Mundaneness

Whenever I think of mundane, I think of Burning, a movie starring Yoo Ah In.  If you haven't heard of him, you can read about him in The New York Times Magazine's The Best Actors of 2018. To borrow the words of A.O. Scott and Wesley Morris, Burning is like watching paint dry... In many ways, the last two years of the pandemic have been like watching paint dry as new coats are placed on top... Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron strip away hopes of the dried wall. 

It seems obtuse to talk about the pandemic as mundane when it has killed over five million and infected more than three hundred million people around the world. At times, it has threatened the survival of humanity. I don't mean the survival of humans, but us remaining humans with hearts and souls exercising our intelligence. Let's face it, the first six months or so were brutal as our lives dwarfed into our homes and nexus. 

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

I had built a lifestyle on philosophies that life is art, to borrow the words of Helena Bonham Carter, and minimalism. I took great joy and serenity from ordinary things... Cooking, reading, knitting, coloring, tending to plants, crafting... I even took great satisfaction after cleaning with a whiff of bleach. 

Time has not changed its pace, but it started to crawl in 2020. Sometimes, the paint may have dried faster than time traveled. Trapped at home, some of us saw the world only through the camera lenses of others reflected on our screens for many months. I normalized life with excessive online shopping... I felt trapped, was I? 

The ordinary things I took joy and serenity no longer gave me the same pleasures in the dwarfed life of the pandemic. A part can be attributed to being trapped in a toxic environment and in an abusive relationship at the time... Everything seemed forced on me as life dwarfed to my MacBook Air screen and the place I once called home. 

As some of us were vaccinated and restrictions lifted, I attempted to return to the life I had once built. I struggled to not fill the void with shopping and miserably failed while I stopped opening delivered packages. Agenda book, which is like a bible to me, became a nuisance. I finished two books, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown and The Other Americans by Laila Lalami. On a side note, don't bother picking up Craig Brown's book on Princess Margaret. 

I flipped through the pages of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and more than halfway through Notorious RBG, The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, by Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik. Honestly, I don't think I read a single line of a poem in those months. 

We are still in the pandemic, but I am no longer feeling as trapped. Perhaps, it was the break from the relationship and moving away, not just from the abuse, but also away from the toxicity of others. While I was frightened of starting over with not even a bed, I discovered that feeling free is the most powerful fuel to life. 

I found myself teary-eyed on my first trip to Target to shop for some basics for my new place after the breakup, on my own. I felt free for the first time in nearly 18 months. The rock of fear and anxiety that I lived with chipped a bit. I didn't buy things out of emotional need, but because I actually needed them. We are talking trash cans and dish towels. I filled the shopping cart with items that I would be using, not items to have. Sometimes, we buy simply to have because we've been taught that we are happier when we have more. 

As I settled into my new home, I found myself craving those ordinary things again. I wasn't attempting to hold on to living... I began to live again. That rock of fear and anxiety cracked more and has been chipping away... Sometimes, big chunks fall off. Time, which once was painfully crawling, is now flying by. 24 hours in a day seem insufficient these days to do those ordinary things.

Four months ago, I had trouble expressing myself and massive memory suppression from the trauma of being strangled and smothered multiple times... I now remember all that happened to me, but not in traumatic flashbacks. Just as memories of my past. I'm crying at this very moment, not because I am sad, but because I'm proud of myself. 

Life can't be splendid, fabulous and Insta-perfect at all times. Life for most of us and at most times is filled with ordinary things... The time we take to discover ordinary things we enjoy and savor those discoveries is the most meaningful gift we can give ourselves. The intention to heal with time and love for ourselves is the most powerful gift we can give ourselves. When we live life rather than try to fill it, mundaneness becomes grandeur.


Bluebella

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