Of all philosophical questions, the deepest and most perplexing might be what to do with an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The question of the purpose of human life coincides with the reality of daily living, with all its banality, boredom, and half-obscured beauty.

I think humanity has a fraught relationship with the everyday. Ordinary, uneventful days pose a specific kind of challenge precisely because they are neither the euphoric high points of our lives nor the crushing low points. Moments of extremity – whether good or bad – crystalize meaning and purpose. In those moments, we know what to do, we feel alive, because we understand something important is happening, even if it is painful.

For example, on a wedding day or the day a child is born, it’s easy to know what to do, it is easy to feel fulfilled, because the meaning is clear, the emotions intense.

The bland texture of ordinary life, on the other hand, offers no such clarity or intensity. The muddy waters of everyday give no clear reflection of the self or of purpose or direction. These are not the “times that try men’s souls” – they’re the times when men doubt that they have souls.

These moments are not the crucible in which a life philosophy, an identity, or a belief rises to the forefront and is tested, where at least we have the excitement of the possibility of dramatic failure.

These days are just there, and sometimes it feels like plodding through the ordinary, nondescript plains in search of one of those rare high places, the mountains that make life feel worth living.

The novelist Walker Percy saw the difficulty clearly. In fact, one might argue his novel “The Moviegoer” is about this problem. The protagonist, Binx Bolling, a successful stock and bond broker, constantly battles against what he describes as “the malaise” of modern life, which is, at least in part, the suffocating ordinariness of his daily life, a life that feels anchorless and artificial.

Other characters in the book sense it, too. Kate, Binx’s love interest, says to him, “Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?” Intense catastrophic moments seem to be the only thing capable of waking people from the malaise of ordinariness. These are the “crucible moments” where all of life is suddenly squeezed into a single burning instant, concentrated and sparkling with flavor, and everything becomes clear, everything and everyone becomes real again.

But such moments are rare.

What to do with the seemingly insignificant days, the days made up of commutes and boring scenery and pointless meetings and short-tempered texting about who will pick up the kids and the same dull food and the same dull reruns on TV? How to fend off, in other words, the “horror of the same old thing” as C. S. Lewis’ demon uncle put it in “The Screwtape Letters”?

Maybe, at this point, you expect me to offer a simple five-step plan for finding meaning in the everyday. But if it were that simple, I’d be off somewhere enjoying the spoils of a bestselling self-help book on the subject. There is no simple solution.

In “The Moviegoer,” Binx launches out on a “search” through the ordinary occurrences of his life to try to discover meaning and a way out of the malaise. Each of us must undertake that same search on our own, and no formula can provide a shortcut.

Still, though I cannot offer a map or a guidebook, I can offer a few notes from a fellow searcher.

First, there are the words of G. K. Chesterton in “Tremendous Trifles”: “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” It seems to be part of the primordial curse of humanity that “familiarity breeds contempt,” and so even objectively wondrous things can become, to our blighted vision, dull and commonplace. Thus, the first thing is to try to learn to see again.

Great art can help with this. As can stillness and quiet. It takes patience and persistent effort, a retraining of the mind and senses, but it is possible.

Chesterton also reminds us that “the way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” These words are an invitation to recognize the fragility of all things, not out of fear or despair but as a pathway to gratitude. We can realize the preciousness of those commutes, of that dull cornfield out the car window, and of those ordinary text threads with our spouse by recognizing none of this is guaranteed. All of it is a gift.

We can recognize the rarity, the near impossibility of what actually surrounds us. If the gravitational constant were just a hair’s breadth stronger or weaker, galaxies and planets would never have formed. Statistically speaking, the universe ought to be a barren, featureless place. But it isn’t. Our presence here is a miracle, utterly unexpected according to everything we know about physics. The odds of the fine-tuning of the universe necessary for life existing as it does are similar to the odds of a marksman aiming at a tiny target on the other side of the universe and hitting it dead center. Impossibly long.

Finally, we must learn to recognize that the book of life is written in the letters of the everyday. What seem to be small, insignificant daily routines are really sketching out, little by little, a grand narrative, a grand adventure. We become hyper focused on the individual letters and forget that, if we step back, there’s an entire story being written, and it is a beautiful, strange, unpredictable, wondrous story.

Our identity, our purpose, and our meaning is formed far less in the extraordinary moments of great highs or lows than it is in the ordinary ones. It’s formed by how we conduct ourselves in the everyday, the unglamorous, the moments that no one notices. Maybe that’s when character matters most.

Realizing this can open the door to the meaning within familiar routines.

—

This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Pexels