The Holy Ordinary

The queen told Alice that when she was her age, she’d think of six impossible things before breakfast.

I saw ( not merely ‘thought of’) sixty today. And if I was doing conventional social media, I may have done 600.

If your growing up years were till the mid-90s, you may remember those in-person hanging out hours with friends where we’d sit, chat, debate, & occasionally also discuss the odd sensational event occupying the day’s headlines – a car doing somersaults on a highway, a pet dog demonstrating prowess in math, a wedding dancer horse throwing off the bridegroom & galloping away, a man fighting & chasing off a leopard from his backyard, etc.

Like Kevin Kelly wrote 10 years ago on his blog, today these far & few between improbable events have become ordinary, accessible to millions on their smartphone windows. 24x7. And these are not just freakish accidents but feats of super-human performance. A parkour artist jumping through roofs of high-rise buildings, a 5-year-old kid solving a complex quadratic equation, a cat switching on a television, a human baby playing with lion cubs, and so on. Each minute, thousands of such impossible visuals are uploaded on the internet, and within minutes, shared & re-shared by millions, adding to the repository of superlatives in the collective human consciousness. To quote Kelly, ‘..as long as we’re online - which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.’

A steady diet of the extraordinary has altered our appetite. Good isn’t good enough & the normal doesn’t seem normal enough anymore. Mere honest presentations don’t seem convincing enough because we’re seeking the flashy TED-talk equivalent pitch in each interaction. Weddings don’t seem solid enough unless they look like a Bollywood extravaganza with themes & sets & choreographed performances. Our family pictures don’t seem complete enough without a generous touch of digital tweaking. Our kids don’t seem worthy enough unless we’re able to splash some eye-popping feats of them out there that generate envy in others. A vacation, or even a simple dining out experience seems futile unless the Instagram stories about them garner a few hundred ‘Likes’. (The other day I actually saw a 50-something couple uploading live videos of a parent’s funeral & also exchanging comments & emojis while the departed soul was still not sent off properly!). The ubiquitous camera on everyone has given each of us a shot at 10 seconds of celebrity life. Daily. On one hand, while the expanding realm of human extremes has stretched the boundaries of human potential, it has also exposed our shallowness & stupidity. Not to mention the mental health burden that comes with being in this state of having to show up as some version of extraordinary at all times or face consequences that lead to dissatisfaction & depression.

It's July 2023. I am on a brief vacation & am spending a few days at my parents’ flat in India. Now throbbing with the absence of voices & laughter that once filled the spaces within, there’s a strange sobering of senses for me as I stand supervising the cleaners arranging the once-familiar, old household effects, many of which have started slipping off my active memory bank, & yet, I’m sure that all of them had stories behind them. Later, after the cleaners leave, I sit browsing through some old family albums. What surprises me is the rarity of occasions when we’d take pictures & yet how every decades-old picture evokes a strong emotion that the thousands of recent pictures in my phone fail to.

An old, creaky chair stands in a corner of one room. For some reason, despite trying my best, I can’t remember the origin story of how it came into our house. I test it for strength & allow myself to gingerly settle in it, letting my mind wander. Maybe I had sat on this chair as a six-year-old, a book in hand, fantasizing about a superhero life featuring me as the main lead. For some reason, the lack of a precise signpost in the land of my memory is liberating. The open-endedness of a bygone life fragment. A little out-of-reach & yet so precious. I grope to assign a definition to the feeling & finally get it.

The ‘holy ordinary’ comes close.

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( Did the above article connect with you ? Do leave your reactions / comments. If you like reading articles on overlapping boundaries of work & life, you may check out my books, ‘As You Life It’ & ‘Life-ing It’, available on Amazon in your country. I am also happy to announce that my new book, ‘Life as unusual. Work as usual’?is coming out later this month. I hope you read it & like it.)

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