Routine and the poetry of the everyday
“Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, the true poetry of life - the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary person, of the plain, toilworn, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and griefs.”
Sir William Osler
Every morning I have a washing and dressing routine, that is virtually automatic. I'm sure you have one too. I have actually tried to step out of that routine a few times, in tiny, tiny ways, like cleaning my teeth before taking my high blood pressure pill instead of the other way around, but I either find I just cannot do it, or if I do (possibly I'm wider awake), the whole morning routine goes out of kilter and I find myself doing silly things or not knowing what to do next. The routine has become a body memory and is fully automatic and almost impossible to change, so deeply ingrained in my being it is.
I think the morning routine is the most fully automatic of my everyday routines, but there are others. Some are not everyday. Some are occasional and associated with a specific task. And cooking is one of the things I do that is most routine. Every day we have to eat, and so part of my morning routine, whilst I am doing the physical things I do every morning, is to think what we should have for dinner. I need to do this then because it might entail taking something out of the freezer or a trip to the shops.
And then when I come to do the cooking itself, there are certain dishes that I can make without even thinking about it too much. Every step in their making is automatic and unthinking. Of course this is not every dish that I make. Every day almost I am actually making something up from the contents of the fridge, but that in itself is a routine. Creativity has its routines too. And I imagine that every true artist has their own little routines - how they prepare their paints and brushes, the canvases, the environment in which they work. Ballet dancers and musicians, and actors practice and practice until they achieve perfection. They have to learn their lines, their moves, their steps, the notes. The performance might seem like a supreme act of creation and it is, but it has been made from an almost endless sequence of routine and repetition.
This blog has also become a routine - if I don't write a post in the day - my routine is upset and I feel it. And with every post I learn a little more, and think a little more - even when my effort has been somewhat feeble. It's one of my efforts at creativity and stepping outside my own daily life. I won't say it's poetry, but it's a tiny bit creative.
If you look up routine in Google images, or if you try to find a quote about routine, you will find that the majority of what you find (like the above) is pretty negative about routine. It's closed, unadventurous, unimaginative, stultifying and boring. We need to step outside the everyday, the routine before we can have any purpose, give any meaning to our lives, reach the heights of what is possible.
“The more you get set into your own world, the smaller your world becomes.” J.R. Rim
And I guess this is true. But we can't all be Michelangelo or Mozart. My world is small and I have no major talent. I am defined by the borders of my home, my suburb, occasionally my city, and most of all by my family, and the things that I do. Everyday. I doubt that I shall be travelling very far to exciting places anymore, or doing anything sensationally new. My excuse is that I am old. But it is a pretty lame excuse really. There are plenty of old people doing amazing things out in the world. Really I think it's just that I am a coward, and lazy. I could travel but the more extreme parts of the world are just too frightening for me, and the more familiar are becoming overrun by tourists - like me. And it seems that even the world's extreme places are going that way too.
Last night I saw a beautiful film called Mountain which showed us extraordinarily beautiful places, and extraordinarily thrilling and amazing feats made by, mostly men, and the occasional woman, in the mountains. I'm still not entirely sure whether the film was praising these people who took extraordinary risks for the ecstatic thrill of it all, or whether it thought they were mad, death seekers. However, one of the film's theses was that in the past the mountains were the realms of gods and spirits and man did not venture there. But now they are seen as places to conquer and enthral and it gave as one example of this, Mount Everest today which is a little like a European tourist hot spot - absolutely overrun by people queueing to get to the top. This shot is from the film.
And yet, although men may talk about conquering the mountains, in fact the mountains are conquering them and are completely indifferent to our efforts. Nevertheless the film also demonstrated how something, once extraordinary, has almost become routine - at least for the tour guides and the sherpas who carry the supplies.
The opposite of adventure and opening up to possibility, is the comfort of home - about which I have spoken a few times I think. And I guess, for me, the comfort of home is what I seek, though maybe not quite as much as my husband. No, I prefer to find my spiritual uplift in the poetry of the everyday. And coincidentally another film I saw recently - Paterson, directed by the inimitable Jim Jarmusch, was all about that. The central character was a bus driver and whose life was completely circumscribed by a daily routine, and yet he had passion - for his wife and for poetry - about the everyday. For beauty and possibility and surprise are all around us - every day.
“The day that lay before (was) full of infinite possibilities, though in a million superficial ways it was identical to the day before.” Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
And here are just a few photos of little surprises, beautiful things, that I have come across here and there in my everyday life.
As you can see, some are of the natural world showing it's beauty to us - some of it there all the time - hiding in plain sight - some of it just occasionally. And then there are the everyday things, like the children walking to school, the man taking his dog for a walk. Beauty is all around if you care to look. And poetry too. The picture at the top of the page was taken in Clifton Hill when I was babysitting the grandsons last summer. We passed it on the way to school. It features the following appropriate, if rather sad little poem:
"There are no old days
no good old days
no, they were the days days
these are the days
and more days
and all days"
Shelton Lea 1946-2005
There's a whole story behind that. A sad one by the sounds of things. Not celebrating the every day, but deploring it, as general opinion and imagery seems to do.
But
“If spectacle is lacking in everyday life, it may be because we have forgotten where and how to look.” Nel Noddings, Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War
