What is daily life? It is hard to determine. Can we catch it? Is it beautiful? Is it colorful? Is it a creature? Is it a space with no dimension? On earth a day has some dimensions, of spaces, times and frequency, modalities and all the living bodies and objects hanging inside it, moving, and shifting. The daily life spreads like jelly in large swaths across memories of the world, only sparingly captured in tiny bubbles of images and writings. The rest just keeps flowing, ineffable, determined to go nowhere.
How to live a daily life?
Do we even know? Can we call that knowing ‘knowledge’? Have we been trained in how to live our daily lives? We have picked up habits. We have inadvertently observed others live but again in ‘short video’ size lengths of time. When did humans start living the everyday? Are we living the everyday right now? We forgot to look at the daily life.
How to live daily life does not start with knowledge. It starts with instincts. We simply try to match and align our instincts with each other and collectively keep moving together across time huddled on a tectonic plate and when we collide with another plate balancing an equally giant blob of living jelly on it, we either groove in or crush the other moving disc and arrive at the edge of one civilization’s crust, its history and lunge on to the next.
Instincts or Tasks
Now coming back to the instincts, with which we respond to the surrounding nature we emerge from, we have stacked upon those instincts towering piles of tiny tasks that we follow and complete in a day. We have to complete the day, although it doesn’t wait for our signal to turn in but we somehow feel compelled to call it, ‘a day’. Living with just the instincts alone we die, destroy each other and that we know. With the guiding set of tasks, we live, we flow, together.
Why have tasks
At first there weren’t any tasks. But we remembered the sounds, the sights, the touches, and the others. Then we shared this memory with each other. Slowly we started remembering things as a group. The shared memory became knowledge. The same things we did together in patterns to respond to nature and to each other built intelligence. As we shared our memories, new and old, we called them stories. And inside the day we lived with tasks and patterns and learnt to see the days ahead, predict them and know what to expect. We lost sense of the present, the daily sounds, sights, and touches. Conscious memories were not forming daily anymore, and we stopped feeling. The feeling of not feeling anything was a strange sensation, something caving in, and touching a cold surface – we all experienced boredom. Even the gods!
Are cows bored?
Perhaps they are. We don’t know. We don’t speak moo. Cows speaking moo must be organising committees every day to get themselves out of their chronic boredom – the chewing and milking and snorting and lashing tails at the cowbirds. Then they forget and start again next day. And before they know they become meat. We become meat too, from boredom. We however remember our boredom, from yesterday and how it will be tomorrow. Some of us know how to start feeling again and the key is inside in the day. But some don’t. Those untrained in the everyday life not knowing how to manage their boredom, form brotherhoods and cults, and go looking for the key outside of the day, somewhere new, in a new dimension, stomping on the precariously floating discs with slime all around, crushing and breaking things just to feel again, rid themselves of boredom, trying to rise above and beyond the day, treading into something bigger, not a day, but a lifetime, they reach the edges of the lifetime, only to realize they still don’t feel a thing, they rush to extend the lifetime, live forever, and still find themselves bored and too late to go back searching for the tiny days filled with tasks and moments they have left far behind.
And then there are those who never feel as much, they are not bored much either, not reflective, never having any conversation with themselves, in fact completely unaware of the default factory setting feature that intelligent humans have, the ability to protrude out of their being, suspended at the end of an articulated arm and taking a nice good look from the outside at this person they are, all the things they do and thoughts they have. These lesser sensitive humans need training, refining the intelligence to become self-reflective, capable of having conversations with oneself. Till then, they will live inside their days, living and forgetting, waiting to become meat.
At this point we invite insights from any scholarly study on bovine boredom before we head out on our search for a feel, a daily sensory journey that keeps us tethered to our rhythms, pushes us ahead and often achieve a new life with a set of fresh new days inside, like a fused banana flower with a cluster of identical baby bananas sticking to each other in a neat row inside each layer, just to blossom in a nutrition filled fruitful day! The imagery of concentric circles of new layers of life gives us hope, let’s keep reading.
The key to 'feeling' is inside in the day
The day is a network of tasks with different objects and people randomly interacting inside the frames of different settings – home, bus, work, playground, club and so on. The involuntary banality comes from the familiarity, repeat and unneeded attention and judgment. We think living differently everyday would take away the boredom. First, it requires additional resources, in the least more time and effort, to formulate a new algorithm of tasks daily. Second, what is so wrong with boredom? In our future writings we will explore the problematic connection between quotidian life and boredom. We will also wonder at great risk of intense daydreaming the possibilities of boredom affecting our AI agents. What we want to know for now is why have a daily life at all? to not have a daily routine life is perhaps the best way to understand the absence of this unpopular experience – the everyday life.
What are the habits we would have trouble giving up, which are those tasks we would miss doing? How does it feel when we are forced to give up our everyday life? Walking miles as refugees from a displaced land; addictions that have snapped all the rhythms; physical or mental pain that sit stubbornly at the centre of the sufferers’ existence; celebrities and hidden heroes, for whom sacrificing daily life is an occupational hazard, they have perhaps lost their anchor and the only recourse is to keep sailing till they get rescued or they drown.
For the sake of an experiment, we could try living each day drastically different. How would it feel to endlessly do things in a day that we have never done before? every day would be a first day at a new job. Diabolical! Occasionally, a day full of anticipations and hype, for such performances of the new and crisp, sounds reasonable but for the rest of the days we would love to retreat to our permanent atmosphere, the relaxing, blah of daily living. Let us therefore resume our search for ‘feeling’ inside in the daily day.
Customising your day –
This undertaking of trying to feel things inside our everyday is like custom fitting a piece of ready to wear clothing, focusing on the fitting and not stich a whole new dress. We will have to first learn to track down what we want, now, and what could wait. Often, we will not be fully sure and very often lost. With unsure steps we will embark on the journey of finding our dreams and aspirations and around them we will custom fit our daily lives. A collection of tiny inconsequential moments, captured infrequently in the side glances of our eyes, will lead up to the end of a phase of life, sometimes neatly closed, and sometimes messy, coming off, falling apart.
Intentional change is phases –
What is important is acknowledging and accepting the end of a stage or phase of life. Without a proper closure, how much ever disorderly, moving on becomes a challenge. In our social interactions, the importance of moving on from relationships, from events, from experiences is adequately emphasised. However, the practical value of looking at life as blocks of time progressing in phases is hardly ever mentioned. Being ready for change or working towards intentional change (new job, new place), is hard but the payoff is a lifetime of dense, fulfilling days of work and vigour, with unseen yet meaningful experiences of ordinary things that build up to big dreams.
Never losing the anchor –
While chasing our dreams and ambitions we set our eyes ahead, naturally losing sense of all the days in-between. On the other side of the dream a new set of days filled with simple tasks, same old boredom, awaits us. This reappearing set of everydays is our anchor and if we have not learnt by now how to live them, we will compulsively clamber for yet another premature dream to chase. The new dream then would not be a natural consequence of curiosity and vision, but rather a desperate attempt to escape or hide one’s inability to live a daily life. In the end if one is lucky, one such compulsive dreamer might still manage to remember a few glorious days of drama and achievements buried under the thick cover of a lifetime of muddled everydays.
The daily life remains formless and a chaotic heap of random moments with an elementary structure that is common and fundamental. We will explore the creative aspects of daily living where in the art of daily living everyone is an artist. Daily life is embedded in the real and yet it can be fictionalised when retold in a story. Between the extremities of the theories of everyday – ‘Revolution of Daily Life’ and ‘Against Everyday’, we will attempt to make sense of the everyday, both the individual and collective experiences, the tasks, their organization, the values, the freedoms, the politics, its narrations through a poet’s gaze.
Essay/Article by : TDLM Editorial
Report This
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.