The Glory of Ordinary Days
I get them - the people who despite Omicron are taking cruises, being at football games shoulder to shoulder with cheering strangers and traipsing through airports where “social distancing” means standing six inches from another traveler grabbing her bags. They have COVID fatigue. I have it too, though my goals are milder. I just want an ordinary day, one where I can dine inside a restaurant, go to a movie and wander the aisles of a grocery store without worrying if the next shopper coming towards me will be wearing a mask.
Clearly, I’m risk averse. What adventures I do have come mostly at the prodding of my wife, and I love her for that. Left to myself, we probably would not have gotten away safely several times last year, mostly to see our family. I relate to the anonymous writer who penned the line that “the only person who likes change is a wet baby.” Just give me an ordinary day and I’m pretty content.
The glory of my ordinary days came vividly to me once again recently without the “benefit” of COVID. It was 7:44 am precisely when the lights flickered – a big, unordinary warning sign – and then went out. Eight inches of wet snow on power lines and poles will do that. It seemed we were plunged back into eighteenth century America where candles would be our only source of artificial light and the fireplace our only source of heat. Of course, modern candles are mostly decorative and our faux-fireplace was electric, not that this mattered a whole lot. Most modern fireplaces are built for show. Their chief feature is their amazing ability to suck warm air out of a room and send it up poorly constructed flues.
Our two days without power looked like this. The inside temperature fell quickly. Coats and scarves compensated, but they did not warm the toilet seat! We could read, of course, though the light on a deep winter day lasts only about ten hours. Anything approaching work was thus confined to what Thomas Jefferson, our Albemarle County neighbor, called laboring from “can see to can’t see.” At Monticello, he was a mountain higher (and colder) than we were. I can only imagine. As for food, we dined on bread and stuff in the cupboard while we watched the food in the refrigerator and freezer approach “throw it away” time. Unlike Jefferson, we had no ice house.
We became misers of the power still left in our Kindles, cell phones and laptop batteries. Using the iPhone to call Dominion Energy to inquire about when we’d have power was a carefully considered decision. It produced a recorded message that, with whatever politeness the harried representative could muster, said “we’re working on your power outage.” No estimate for how long it would last ever emerged.
All this re-kindled why I value ordinary days. I do sometimes hanker for a special trip, a magical experience, a once-in-a-lifetime moment. These add luscious flavor to my life. But it’s the ordinary things and times that populate most of my days: the glow of the reading lamp over my favorite chair, the warm air washing over me as I come inside on a cold day, the hot soup and the smell of a freshly baked pie coming out of the oven, the computer and phone that connect me to family and the world, and the ability to crawl under the sheets and comforter at night (without having a winter coat on!). Such ordinary things also make for a luscious life.
As a status quo kind of guy, I like predictability. That’s what ordinary days provide. Rongjun Yu and colleagues at Cambridge and University College London involved participants in a gambling task where they could choose to “stay” or “gamble” and then find out whether they won or lost. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) of the brain, they found that when people chose to “stay”, the pleasure center in the brain was activated. That’s me. I’m the “stay” person, although I admit the world would be an often dreary and much less inventive place if everyone was like me.
I also know, of course, that too many ordinary days don’t give you: the opportunity to face new challenges, conquer the roadblocks to living fully and get that “thrill of victory” that for decades Jim McKay of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” reminded us was the reward for winning. So I admit it felt good to make it through two days without power, to find ways to amuse ourselves, to laugh (even if our breath hung in the air like an indoor mini-fog), and to know that we could endure.
As I began to write this, another storm was headed our way. If it had presented another challenge, I would have been up for it. Thankfully it did not, and I had an ordinary day. It triggered a feeling of gratitude and, at the same time, a prayer that so many who suffer in the world could just have some ordinary days.
Photo Credit: Carol Donsky Newell
