brushing teeth, being at sea
Growing up I was always mature for my age and yet I hated the mundane tasks of daily life beyond being able to even express it, it was the only un-adult thing about me at the time. It made me angry to think about doing the repetitive, mind-numbing things life demands of you. I thought maybe I was just impatient. I then realised I just hated everything that wasn’t highlight-reel worthy; I was constantly sick of waiting for the good parts, and the ‘waiting’ always happens whilst you do the dishes or make the bed. I just kept wishing for the filler part to stop, skip to the part where I'm brilliant, I'd think, skip to the part where I'm not brushing my teeth. The fact that adults were okay with time constantly resetting everything used to irk me so much: time passing and flowers actually wilting if you didn’t water them, or the lawn actually growing back even after you’ve cut it just drove me crazy. It sounds really obvious and really stupid but I guess it was my first real encounter with impermanence and I was mortified that this was normal and that nobody felt the same.
Of course I grew older and grew up, but things like that still bothered me, mostly because they felt unmanageably endless to me. Somewhere along the way I pushed myself to sit with the feeling of restless boredom and try to make something of it, I was too old to keep giving into my instinctive impatience. I started to notice that the mundane was the brilliant, and that everything is everything else, or at least its opposite. Sleep is defined more by its status as the opposite of being awake than it is by being ‘sleep’, and hating someone is usually born out of a loving expectation, and being alone is identifiable by being without company. Everything is a ‘without’, everything is a negative as much as it is itself. Of course, this philosophy is rudimentary but it can be rather revolutionary when applied to the right things.
Brushing your teeth is only boring because you think something else is brilliant, so I guess brushing my teeth makes art beautiful, and holds my friends close, waters my flowers, and keeps my life full.
I think about this sometimes when I feel like I need an editor (in my writing and in my life), which actually means I really don’t need an editor at all. Or how being bored actually makes you prolific, actually feeds your moments of brilliance. That moment of silence in a loud room says far more than all of the words combined, and your uncertainty actually means you’re extremely certain about some things. I find that last one is especially comforting.
That makes me feel like the small moments must be laden with meaning, in some other secret way, and I use the time doing the dishes to switch off my mind, save the rage. Or I stargaze in the soap suds and try to find a thread that leads me back to the brilliance. No more fighting the current, no more going down swinging. These days I rely on boring moments to cool me off, to let me think, to steer me away. These days when I brush my teeth I am at sea.