Today has a colour, and it’s grey. I feel like a Sesame Street edition. “Today is brought to you by the number three and the letter X,” only far less exciting.
But I’ve shown up.
I show up every day, though some days feel more reluctant than others, lingering like a persistent mist on a sunny day. This is the least talked-about bit, the meh-ness of the customary. That flat place you land after going full tilt for too long, where even simple things like trying to make the bed or load the washing machine feel like climbing Everest.
So I need to keep today in perspective, and to do that, I want to tell you a story.
Once upon a time, there was a man who sat in his chair on a beach and watched the ocean through his binoculars. He watched the birds dive, and the storms rage, he collected what was left on the tideline and made himself a home and a life on the edge of the water. Each day brought a variation of the same, but they were always different in some very tiny way.
Other people came to the beach, and they would watch the man, watching the water, the birds and the weather through his binoculars. They would turn their eyes to the horizon and shield their faces from the wind or the sun and search for what the man saw, but they always left disappointed. Sometimes people asked him what he saw, but he always had the same answer; he said nothing.
His world was enough.
I wonder what that man missed with his view of the world? What meanings did he give to the world he saw, or the one he didn’t. Take Monday, for example. Who decided it should feel like a beginning or a test, a day that asks us to be something more? And when it isn’t, why do we treat it like a failure?
What a thing life would be if we could all sit in a plastic chair on a beach and just see what was in front of us.
Ordinary becomes strange when you forget it. Today, on this grey Monday, everything feels offensive with its normalness. Auden ordered policemen to wear black cotton gloves; the man on the beach, he missed a man waving and drowning. Me, I’m lusting for a storm just to prove I’m still here in the world somewhere. Anything but Meh. Anything but a grey ordinary Monday in January. Because it doesn’t feel like anything, not sadness, not grief and yet, it has exactly the same aftertaste.
Leave a Reply