One of these thoughts hit me the other day. I'm a fairly deep-feeling person, and I enjoy challenge, novelty, passion, and maybe even a kind of melancholy if I can find a positive use for it. But I also occasionally find myself in one of those intense or discouraging moments having had enough, and struggling to find the end of it. To use the metaphor of boats, it's like feeling seasick without a port anywhere nearby. Or, as I've often heard repeated in the flying community, "It's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground."
The thought that hit me was a thankfulness that the "ground" usually comes to me without my necessarily having worked through or resolved whatever issue was rocking my boat. Sometimes the only difference is a night's sleep, even if the circumstances are exactly the same in the morning. We begin another day brushing teeth, making coffee, scrambling eggs. It's all still there, and the world is somehow bigger and more stable than it felt.
Many times I've bemoaned the negative side of this normalizing tendency, how my human nature gradually (sometimes quickly) normalizes something that amazes me or gives me wonder. As David Wilcox observes in Travelling Companion, "I'm sure if we all could sort of...jump and fly through the air we'd be really happy for about, you know, a week. And then we'd be sitting around saying, 'Well, I don't know, everybody can fly, you know, I'm nothing special...'"
But perhaps the automatic relief normalcy offers outweighs the fact that we must fight as if against gravity to maintain the soaring wonder that makes our lives so exciting. I'd never wish my life to be mundane, but for the first time I've come to consciously appreciate that I don't have to beat every storm with my own resources. Sometimes all I have to do is wait a bit.
This is a poem about that:
The Normal Day to Day
Thank God for the normal day to day,
The firm ground beneath the heights we soar,
The plain daylight above our deepest pits,
The pull of gravity that meets our feet in the morning
And makes every next step sure and familiar.
Thank God that when tragedy blackens the mind,
And loneliness promises to gnaw us every future hour,
They somehow dissipate on the sandy shore of normalcy,
And we need only wring our socks from the tempest
That tore at our tattered souls the night before.
Thank God the wind abates and between every storm
Miles of mild weather stretch out and seem to say,
“Not yet. No more for a while. Now is rest again.”
And though we will grow restless and hunger for adventure,
We shall surely meet it with bravery and strength drawn
From the normal day to day.
