9 hours ago
13
Lately I’ve been playing with a thought experiment: what if I was told the rest of my life would be completely ordinary? Not bad, just unremarkable.
My immediate response is, “Well, ordinary is better than awful” (forever the optimist), and then almost immediately (and embarrassingly), “This is not how life is meant to play out! I want something more!”
These questions came to me as I read Barry Magid’s book Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, a provocative reflection on Zen and psychoanalysis that upends some of the more infantile, and yet very natural, fantasies we smuggle into spiritual practice – and into life itself.
We rarely say these thoughts out loud. Perhaps we don’t even fully think them. But, as the book suggests, many come to spiritual practice to rise above the “banality” of daily life. We use it, sometimes surreptitiously, to become more accomplished, more “one” with things and, quite simply, happier. We even use it to feel self-righteous and superior. The spiritual path promises something special: a heightened experience, a compelling identity, something other than what we have right now.
With time we may come to realise that we will probably get none of that but something else entirely.
After furiously underlining passages in the book, I gave a talk on it, a kind of ode to being ordinary, and it was met with some resistance. Isn’t being “ordinary” simply acquiescing to the status quo? Aren’t the masses being duped by late capitalism? And is an ordinary life a meaningless life? Or, heaven forbid, a sign we are not “leaning in”?
I recognise these value judgments in myself. The ordinary is not something we usually aspire to – it’s seen as a sign of moral failure. A life unlived. A lazy, flattened existence. Unsurprising, given that we live in a world that values the growth mindset, self-improvement and optimisation.
Later, looking at the Oxford definition of “ordinary”, I saw it pointed elsewhere. To be ordinary was to be common, indistinguishable by rank or position. That sounded kind of Buddhist to me.
To be ordinary in this sense is not to abandon our ethical responsibility but rather to challenge our unwavering commitment to exceptionalism that capitalism leverages. We struggle to remain still with ordinary moments. The market offers us countless ways to outsource the activities we deem unremarkable – emails, the shopping, managing the everyday.
In spiritual circles, the desire to transcend the ordinary is often the entry point. We want to find peace, to become more alive, to be a better version of ourselves. We go to retreats, we chant, we meditate. We picture one day being the teacher, sitting on the podium. We fantasise about insight, about peace, about transcendence.
Conceit appears in a subtle form – we perform humility, kindness and compassion. Sometimes this leads to the real thing, other times it solidifies our sense of superiority.
And yet these fantasies are the first necessary step on our journey – a stage we must pass through before we face disillusionment toward our fixation on self-advancement. What once dazzled us is no longer compelling. We end up back at the beginning, reinhabiting the ordinary, re-entering the place we once vowed to abandon. As the 13th-century Zen master Eihei Dōgen offered, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; then they are no longer mountains and waters; and finally, they are once again mountains and waters.
These teachings are not about rejecting growth. As the Japanese Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, you are perfect but could do with some improvement. Rather they are about seeing through fantasies and relaxing our disdain for the everyday. And eventually returning to what is already present, this time with greater mindfulness, lightness, appreciation and even enchantment.
As the cultural theorist Ben Highmore suggests, the ordinary is not banal at all. It is messy, dense, artful. What is hidden behind habitual activities is a cacophony of textured, sensual experience – the lifeblood of human culture itself. The everyday has its own aesthetic integrity. And the more we study it, as social scientists say, the stranger and more interesting the ordinary becomes.
We notice the simple fact of our existence – how intimate it is to have a body, to live in a world that continually touches our senses. How our body functions, and the cyclical care of others’ bodies. Our half-formed daydreaming. Our drifting. The moments of pleasure we barely register. A kind of holy repetition as we cook, clean, care.
There is an often-told Zen story that when the Zen teacher Sono was known to repeat these words: “Thank you very much, I have no complaints whatsoever.” There was nothing left to argue with, there was nothing lacking within the ordinary.
And here the distinction between what is meaningful and what is mundane begins to collapse. The ordinary is no longer the opposite of the special. And experience takes on an even, steady flavour. What we once dismissed as unremarkable reveals itself to us as sufficient, satisfying, even luminous.
In this sense, we are not practising spirituality to move away from life but to return to it. Or, as the psychologist Jack Kornfield put it: “After the ecstasy, the laundry.”
We begin to let go of the desire for ascent and turn toward the conditions of our lives – we answer emails, wash the dishes, go to the shop – with no complaints. We see these details not as obstacles to something more meaningful but as openings that invite us to relinquish our self-focused drive to be someone else or somewhere else and instead surrender to what is – bringing mindful receptivity to the rhythm of life.
I often tell people that I grew up in an ordinary household – eating chips, watching Sale of the Century, going to the corner shop with my grandma – and I can see myself doing it all again as I age. But this time I will recognise its beauty, its poignancy, without needing it to be more than what it already is. Irreducibly and spectacularly ordinary.
