Mundane 🗞️ Slow News Day #38

Hey,

To love is to relish the mundane.

I read this the other day in Tracksmith’s journal. The piece is ostensibly about running, but that line has been ringing in my ears since I read it and I think it extends far beyond running.

Romantic love is ablaze with passion… and it’s a comforting, familiar head resting on my chest each night when I fall asleep.

Platonic love is stomach-aching laughter and heart-swelling connection… and it’s reliving the same moments and memories over and over.

My love for writing is buzzy and sends out solar flares of excitement… and it’s repetitive and restricted to the same 26 letters each time.

The mundanity is there all the time and the bright sparks flash intermittently. The mundanity is the love, as much as the highlights are.

I used to think that routine was a prison, that the mundanity kept me back from things that would really light me up and feel like living. Turns out, the light was always inside me — it was never reliant on events outside of myself — and it was up to me to turn it on.

The routine was living all along.

Learning to love the ordinary and snatch some focus back from the extraordinary feels like a critical step in creating a life that feels truly enriching. After all, the day-to-day routine is the only consistent part of my experience. The other parts that emerge are surprises — rarities that, ultimately, are aberrations from the norm. They're wonderful and I love to seek them out, but to live a life that's entirely in pursuit of the extraordinary is one of sacrifice, not surplus.

I still make myself frustrated or bored or imagine that life should be more thrilling and exotic than I make it, but life is the bit that bubbles away below the surface — regardless of where I am or what I’m doing.

Getting back to the baseline of mundanity and finding the lovable parts there is a loftier goal than I ever would have thought.

Slow down guide

Need a little help moving slower?

Ease your way out of Friday afternoon with this newsletter, a nice cup of something, and a little background music. Steal my setup if you aren't sure where to start.

After I press send, I’ll be returning to Yallah Coffee’s La Cabana roast from a couple of weeks ago. It was so good in Espressini’s batch brew, I ended up buying myself a bag. Try before you buy in action, innit. I can’t recommend it enough — silky, juicy, and tonnes of interesting notes that come to the fore depending on your brew method.

And after last week’s missive on running, I want to share a song that’s as fit for an afternoon jog as it is for enjoying a cup of coffee. Love You by Bully ft. Soccer Mommy has the driving, faithful bass line to get you moving at a steady pace and the texture to get you sitting back and nodding your head as you relax into the afternoon. Lovely vocals — a bit sneering and ‘ugh whatever’, but sometimes stepping into pure harmony. That’ll do nicely.

Take it easy,