these ordinary repetitions

all of this is living

February 3, 2025. It’s been raining.

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Anna called me to catch up the other day. It was the middle of a work day, so we were forced to cram a quarter of a year into forty-five minutes. That sounds bleak, but it’s not so bad. You can know someone for the rest of your life if you call them for forty-five minutes every few months. The only downside is most of my friends live far away from me, so I have to call a lot of people. That’s a lot of being alive to summarize.

Anna asked what I’ve been doing for the last three months. I paused. What have I been doing? I buy groceries with my parents. I run circles around the same lake, three times a week. I read a book while waiting for the dryer to finish. Frankly, there is no grand quest I’m undertaking. At least not one that I’m aware of, or care to share.

“I’ve just been living, I guess.” That’s what I told her. Which is kind of a stupid answer, but it really was the truth. I hadn’t taken any trips to exotic countries, nor had any adventures with wild tales. Did I achieve anything at all? Strangely, I felt guilty. Maybe I hadn’t done enough, or even worse, maybe I’m just uninteresting. That’s the vanity of youth — to think that there’s always something more to find out, prodding at your side that you better use this up, all of it, before it extinguishes and the hopes of tomorrow become the dreams of yesterday.

Lately I’ve been finding myself submerged in the overwhelming ordinary-ness of routine. That’s all I can recall. Filling up gas at the Chevron. Absently conversing at the dinner table with my grandparents. Washing the dishes by hand, shutting off the water each time you speak so I can hear your voice. Surrounded by media that values challenge and triumph and convenient turns of story, sometimes I forget that this, all of this, is living — not just intermissions to be omitted for notable milestones.

Modern life coaxes out an endless appetite for narrative fantasy. We are implicitly urged to devote ourselves in hermitic pursuit of an admirable, extraordinary goal. We imagine becoming the courageous version of ourselves that backpacks solo across Europe and has a moonlit, Spanish tryst. We privately crave the existence of a notable artist, business founder, and so on. Aspirations which are all perfectly fine to pursue, certainly interesting to recount to others, and generally, good for the world.

But sometimes the present moment doesn’t hold a grand dragon to slay, or a dramatic secret to uncover. We don’t always need to put makeup on our life to enjoy living it. It requires a certain degree of honesty to admit to yourself, “This is what I have. I will stay put.” And maybe you will discover that free from the excess of expectation your life is given back to yourself, and that these ordinary repetitions have intrinsic worth, a grace and rhythm of their own.