Power of Ordinary Life

Let not a person revive the past 

Or on the future build his hopes 

For the past has been left behind 

And the future has not been reached 

Instead with insight, let him see 

Each presently arisen state 

Let him know that and be sure of it 

Invincibly and unshakably 

Today the effort must be made; 

Tomorrow, death may come, who knows? 

No bargain with mortality 

Can keep him and his hordes 

But, one who dwells thus ardently, 

Relentlessly, by day, by night 

It is he, the peaceful sage has said 

Who has had a single excellent night

- Bhaddekaratta Sutta

One of my favorite and simplest lines of wisdom was from Philip Larkin's as quoted in the book The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters (Philosophy in Action) by Thomas Hurka.

Writing to a friend's newborn daughter, the poet Philip Larkin wished that not she be talented or beautiful but that she be ordinary. "In fact, may you be dull / If that is what a skilled, / Vigilant, flexible, / Unemphasised, enthralled / Catching of happiness is called." I'll assume that Larkin wasn't utterly misguided and what he was wishing the young girl were indeed one of the best things in life."

By sheer random luck for most of our lives are filled with ordinary days. Bad days are inevitable and exotic days are rare. The antonym of a bad day is not a good day but an ordinary day.

Imagine receiving a Nobel prize and sitting there for hours in a tight tux with an urge to pee. The pleasure of finally relieving oneself is the most underrated in that context. I have watched Max suffer in his final months to do that simple act and had a catheter to help him. We grossly under-estimate the ordinary things.

We live in one of the most peaceful and comfortable times in history, no scarcity of food, myriad of modern comforts, and all our bodily faculties functioning properly but yet we have no gratitude and long from some abstract concept of wealth, travel, toys, constant gluttony, and limitless non-essential subjective dreams.

A simple act of kissing Max in the morning, preparing his breakfast, a nice walk with him, playing with him, and kissing him good night will never ever be possible. No amount of wealth nor knowledge would bring him back to enjoy those simple acts again.

As I get older, the simple act of brushing my teeth, going potty/peeing, eating, drinking a cool beer, a slow walk, climbing stairs and so on would be a Sisyphean task. What I am taking for granted today will be a gift tomorrow. No one else other than Max bought this meditation into my constant conscious awareness.

Adam Smith who was a rare breed who understood human nature better than anyone else, tells us the story of a poor man's son in The Theory of Moral Sentiments who lives an entire life in self-deception:

How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it.... They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles… of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.

Nor is it only with regard to such frivolous objects that our conduct is influenced by this principle; it is often the secret motive of the most serious and important pursuits of both private and public life. 

The poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich. He finds the cottage of his father too small for his accommodation, and fancies he should be lodged more at his ease in a palace. He is displeased with being obliged to walk a-foot, or to endure the fatigue of riding on horseback. He sees his superiors carried about in machines, and imagines that in one of these he could travel with less inconveniency. He feels himself naturally indolent, and willing to serve himself with his own hands as little as possible; and judges, that a numerous retinue of servants would save him from a great deal of trouble. He thinks if he had attained all these, he would sit still contentedly, and be quiet, enjoying himself in the thought of the happiness and tranquillity of his situation. He is enchanted with the distant idea of this felicity. It appears in his fancy like the life of some superior rank of beings, and, in order to arrive at it, he devotes himself for ever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness. To obtain the conveniencies which these afford, he submits in the first year, nay in the first month of his application, to more fatigue of body and more uneasiness of mind than he could have suffered through the whole of his life from the want of them. He studies to distinguish himself in some laborious profession. With the most unrelenting industry he labours night and day to acquire talents superior to all his competitors. He endeavours next to bring those talents into public view, and with equal assiduity solicits every opportunity of employment. For this purpose he makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises. Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it. It is then, in the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled by the memory of a thousand injuries and disappointments which he imagines he has met with from the injustice of his enemies, or from the perfidy and ingratitude of his friends, that he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility, no more adapted for procuring ease of body or tranquility of mind than the tweezer-cases of the lover of toys; and like them too, more troublesome to the person who carries them about with him than all the advantages they can afford him are commodious. 

If we consider the real satisfaction which all these things are capable of affording, by itself and separated from the beauty of that arrangement which is fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confound it in our imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or oeconomy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.

And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth. The earth by these labours of mankind has been obliged to redouble her natural fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of inhabitants. … 

The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

Wealth is one example. One can substitute it for fame, flaunting knowledge, attention-seeking, and many other signaling traits we deceive ourselves, others, and lose living life.

One thing Smith's example assumes is that most people would reflect on the "lost" life in their last days. I doubt that - feeling some sense of emptiness and noogenic neurosis is not exactly self-reflection.

One has to know what is that they lost in order to reflect on what they had lost. This is a double-qualia problem where most society is oblivious to the simple and ordinary pleasures of life.

My favorite Stoics, David Hume, and Adam Smith all of them downplayed this human trait. Only John Gray in recent times with his gloomy portray of human nature,  Montaigne a few centuries earlier with his candor and Robert Trivers with his most under-rated concept of self-deception understood the importance of this disease.

If we fail to diagnose the disease (or down-play the diagnosis), we can never make moral progress. 

Our social structure should promote self-reflection, developing a sense of gratitude, understanding the difference between "means" to an "end where means and end are different entities - and most importantly constantly acting on these traits. Sadly, our so-called quasi-moral religious institutions, political system, markets, and ordinary people promote beliefs in magic and dopamine-driven pleasures of an infinite loop but no place for these earthly traits.

The crazy thing is everyone is capable of doing this without any external assistance - "Buddha Nature" resides within each one of us but yet most don't.  But Why? That's an important question to meditate on.

Austin Kleon in his book Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad sums up it nicely into a simple equation that explains the power of ordinary life which is nothing but a sum of numerous well-lived ordinary days.

The ordinary + extra attention = the extraordinary