Embracing the Ordinary

It is in the nature of many of us to strive for perfection, to work fervently towards a particular goal. And it is good that we aim high. But as George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Man can reach the highest peaks, but he cannot stay there long."

It is the nature of humankind to strive, to do our best, to keep moving forward, "onwards and upwards forever" as the old Unitarian maxim had it. Yet because the direction of life is always forward to the future, each time we achieve something, whether it is something small, or something huge, we find that life goes on, regardless. We achieve the goal - whether it is the publication of the book, the qualification, the new job, the new relationship - and then we have to learn to fold it in to our ordinary, everyday lives. Because nobody can live at the peak of emotions for any length of time - first of all, it is exhausting, and second of all, it will set us up for disappointment when we (inevitably) come down.

So what should we do? I believe that we should honour our achievements, our arrival at the peak, but hold them lightly at the same time. There's a lovely passage in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, which illustrates this idea beautifully: Screwtape explains that what God wants of us is for us to live in the Present, where time meets eternity. He comments, "To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too - just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties is in the Present... He does not want men to give the Future thier hearts, to place their treasure in it... His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

He argues that it is the devil's job to make people "hag-ridden by the Future - haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth - ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other - dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see."

So the trick (I think) is to continue to strive for the highest and best we know, but simultaneously to recognise that moments of high achievement are always, always transitory, and to accept that most of our lives will be lived at a more ordinary level. And that the ordinary (by which I mean our daily lives) is okay. More than okay - it is where we can find contentment.