Everyday Magic: Formally Known As 'A Protest Against Forgetting'
Hello, friends. It's Kevin. Thank you for visiting.
I've changed the name of our occasional communications here to EVERYDAY MAGIC because it's the best explanation I have for what motivates me to make stuff-- a clear and wondrous recognition of the ordinary.
I like monuments and miracles too. I don't care for the monumental idea that we need the exceptional all the time to live exceptional lives. Because the exceptional will happen whether we look for it or not. And needing everything or even most things to be exceptional feels like needing to be high in order to get out of bed. It places a huge burden on just the act of living.
In her essay "The Riddle of The Ordinary" (about 3/4 of the way through this book) Cynthia Ozick opens with...
The Extraordinary is easy. There is no one around who does not notice when something special is happening. The Ordinary, simply by being so ordinary tends to make us ignorant or neglectful. We take for granted the things that most deserve our gratitude.
I love Ms. Ozick's thoughts here for one selfish reason: I get overwhelmed easily. So the idea that what you need to both get through and thrive is on your desk or around or ankle makes life seem doable, even when it's maddening. It compels big dreams to reside here on earth instead of lost to the faraway kingdom of the imagination.
The map and tools you need, you probably already have. That sounds like optimism, spelled differently.
Much of what will follow, name change excepted, will be the same as past versions of this newsletter: A quick How To on a common problem, some shared information (focused on the ordinary we overlook) and some recommendations (same theme).
Adventures are central to a well-lived life. But to be continuously adventuring is to be unwilling to sit still, to admire or simply be grateful. If everything is an adventure, then everything also contains the loud risk of an adventure which makes it too easy to be scared off from taking the first step.
To first steps then. Pile them up and you might get monuments. Or you might get a sensible chair. But what is right in front of us is always more than it seems and usually gives us more power and freedom than we think.
How To: See What's Right in Front of You
First you have to pay attention. I wish I could help with that because paying attention is not even a matter of discipline or and will power but emotional priorities. Some of us feel better and work stronger by being half-checked out all the time. If that's your way of functioning and it works, who am I to say otherwise?
But let's say you feel half-checked out all the time and have that vague sense of not really being in and of your own life. Here's what to do about it.
Stop and turn:
We usually don't notice what's right in front of us because we're seeing it the same way every time we see it. And it's easy for something to feel invisible (or really, not noticed) if it feels so common we've either stopped really looking at it or thinking about it.
Noticing is the act of looking + thinking.
To notice the ordinary, you have to make it different (ironically enough) for just a second. You do that by sneaking up on it.
Take anything you do all and change 20% of your literal approach to it. Walk to work via a different route once a week. Enter your bedroom looking up, or to your right, or backwards. Sit on the floor while folding laundry and every 10 minutes, spin 30 degrees and face a different direction. I promise you will see something, even in these places you inhabit every day, that you haven't before.
I'm sure this all sounds childish and obvious. But we almost always miss what's right in front of us because our approach to it is so routine it whizzes by like scenery from the window of a train. So to see it clearly you have to stand up inside your train cabin, or lean your head out the window.
Or jump out.
Body + Mind:
I make needless messes in the kitchen usually because I don't notice I have food on my hands then I open a drawer now what I just ate is now smeared all over the cabinets. 10 points if you can guess this happened, every time, when I didn't notice what was on my fingers until afterward.
Which mean my thinking self and my physical self were acting as though they did not know each other.
Now, whenever I open a draw or a cabinet in the kitchen I hold my hands at eye level first. The connection between thinking and being is made real which is just another way of noticing.
The next time you say "I always overlook _ " associate a physical action with noticing it.
Record and Recall:
It's too easy to forget (i.e. not notice over the long term) even what we fully absorb in the present. There's simply too much in life to notice, especially if you are actually paying attention.
Depending on how you learn and/or remember best, always carry your remembering tools with you: A tool for writing things down or taking pictures or recording sound or video. But capturing isn't enough. You've got to do something with the things you capture. In both short term and long.
Short term: When you get back to your desk you must save/archive the stuff you captured while away from your desk. Archive means "a way you can find it later" v. dump it somewhere and never think about it again. The whole point here is to be able to remember it and think about it again.
Long term: Label it in such a way where you can find it again. And pick a time (I like Sunday afternoons when I am planning my week) where you go over your captures/notes/thumbtacks from your week. You don't have to do anything with them other than sigh and say "remember that?" like you would a family photo album. Because noticing and remembering (long-term noticing) is the point here, right?
In total, give in say 10 minutes.
Stop and Turn. Body with Mind. Record and Recall.
Interrupt mental fog with physical deliberateness.
Junk Drawer: Everyday Miracles in Our Own Homes
Here's where we'll put interesting tidbits of information to share. The next section will be recommendations, also related to the theme.
This week's theme. Stuff you didn't know about stuff in your home.
The word "hall" used to describe the long central passage of a house comes from same use of the word "Hall" do describe a grand building like "Winchester Hall." i.e way back before the invention of staircases and upper floors when pretty much all the business of a household took place in one big room. It would take many hundreds of years for homes to add rooms and upper floors and to shrink down the "hall" to a passageway instead of the main room where everything happened. The "hall" in your house is a leftover from when a hall was a giant gathering place.
The word "kitchen" comes from the Latin word coquere which means "to cook" and comes from this later version of homes when separate rooms were built and named according to their use.
The recommended dimensions for staircases are 7 inches in height (called the "rise") and 10 inches in depth (called the "run") based on the average size of the human foot and the angle of the human leg when lifted.
The "ottoman" is named this because it was introduced to Europe in the 19th century from Turkey, the former Ottoman empire.
The recommended height for hanging pictures or artwork is 57 inches which averages out to close enough to "eye level" for the most of range of human height.
The most common color of wall paint in America is "bright white" which didn't exist until the invention of titanium dioxide until the 1940s. Before then most white paint would now be described as "off white." Gleaming white churches seen in paintings of say 1700s small-town-life are an invention of artists involved.
Calling single beds "twin beds" came from the hotel industry, which typically would fit two single beds into one room therefore purchase them in pairs.
Recommendations/Source Material:
If knowing more about our home environment interests you, Bill Bryson's 2010 book AT HOME is a great time. Bryson does tend to over-research at times but he's such a skilled storyteller than you'll blink, won't realize you've spent 2 hours learning about bathroom sink design, and won't care anyway.
I'm going to assume everyone knows about the great 99% Invisible Podcast (whose subject for 536 episodes as of this writing remains "the manmade world") so instead I will insist you to the second (and final) season of Nice Try (hosted by our dear friend Avery Trufelman) which done a brilliant job on how common household objects like crock pots and door bells reveal about our human failings and desires.
Finally this is a bit off base but if you like to bake you cannot miss the 2009 documentary KINGS OF PASTRY about the M.O.F competition to determine the greatest craftsman in France. Here, the contestants must design and cook pretty much every conceivable kind of dessert in order to with the coveted red white and blue stripped collar. The tension of season final episodes of the Great British Baking Show is child's play compared to watching a chocolate sculpture a chef spent 16 hours making collapse in their hands. (available on Amazon Prime).
Final Thought:
"The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm.
The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there."
Until next time, notice something new.
-- Kevin
Written at home.
Logo by Dave Linabury