The Sublime is Often Wrapped Inside the Mundane
One sultry August evening many years ago, I was in the embrace of my hammock, sheltered in the shade, listening to Miles Davis. With my eyes closed and Davis’s mesmerizing horn in my ears, I was startled when my four-year-old son started to climb up next to me.
I pulled him into the hammock, took out my headphones, and together we listened to Kind of Blue, his tiny body pulled close to mine in the hammock’s sag, his head resting on my shoulder, both of us breathing the deep, restful breaths of perfect contentment.
Some of us spend our whole lives searching for transcendence. Some will spend years of their life contorting their bodies and minds to catch a glimpse of the extraordinary. Some will spend small fortunes visiting amusement parks, while others will use chemical substances to try to escape the perceived bonds of human consciousness.
We all sense there is something greater out there. You yearn for it; I search for it.
You do not need to be an expert meditator or the student of a mountaintop guru to experience transcendence. You don’t have to be in a cathedral or mosque. You don’t need to be extraordinary or to do exceptional things to find the sublime in this life. The sublime is wrapped in the mundane events of your daily life.
And that is why it’s so easy to miss.
We have created a culture that works to tear us apart from the inside. You’ve seen the stories and stats about how we are lonelier than ever, our teenagers are more neurotic than ever, and we hate each other more than ever. At the same time, thousands of books, podcasts, articles, and social media posts tell us how to be extraordinarily happy.
Scrolling on social media is an exercise in outrage. If social media apps were your only source of information, you would think that the only things we have an abundance of in this world are anger and inadequacy.
We scheme to make more money by being more productive with our side hustles. If you are not rich and taking fabulous vacations to fantastic destinations, you are losing.
Our culture tells us the only way to be happy is to be extraordinary. But unless you live in Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, it’s impossible for most of us to live extraordinary lives.
We live in a time of deep dissatisfaction. In the United States, much of that dissatisfaction is driven by an intractable set of real problems. However, our huckster culture that peddles detox cures, minimalism, and get-rich-quick schemes also plays a significant part in generating a sense of isolation.
On top of this, we now have techbros trying to push AI as the next great solution to our economic woes. Of course, AI is just a high-tech game of three-card monte. Us regular people will never win playing that game.
If all of this sounds bleak, you must understand there is hope. But the way out of this situation requires a change in your mindset.
When the game is rigged, the only way to win is not to play.
If you want to live a life of contentment and happiness, if you want to experience the sublime more often, you need to be brave enough to fully enjoy a mundane existence.
You have to live an audaciously mundane life.
Wonders are everywhere if you’re willing to look. If you are willing to be curious. Every single day, our star rises in the east and sets in the west. How often have you stopped, even for a minute, to look at this daily miracle? When was the last time you noticed the way the rare warmth of the sun on your face during a clear winter day?
Every night of every season is also filled with moments that could be transcendent, if you were willing to slow down and notice them.
I’m a late Gen-Xer. That means my parents were Baby Boomers, and my grandparents were all survivors of the Great Depression and World War II. On my dad’s side, my grandparents were both teachers who also owned a gas station and grocery store in rural Idaho attached to their house. On my mom’s side, her stepfather was a master plasterer, and her mom was an administrative assistant at the state hospital.
My grandparents left little in the way of an inheritance when they passed. They were never rich, but they were some of the happiest people I’ve ever met because they knew how to be happy with enough. They knew how to find the small joys in life.
They were extraordinarily ordinary.
None of them ever ran a marathon or took a trip around the world. My dad’s mom kept a beautiful flower garden, and my mom’s mother raised a variety of vegetables in her backyard.
My grandpas would take me for long drives around the Idaho countryside on hot summer afternoons, telling me stories about their lives and showing me where our people used to live. They taught me to fish and how to turn any incidental interaction into a funny story.
When my grandparents weren’t entertaining grandchildren or on road trips staying with relatives, they played cards or dominoes with their neighbors and friends from church.
There were no cruises or sports cars.
For most of human existence, that was how we all lived. We worked, played, and then we died. Life used to be simple.
The truth is, it still can be. If you are willing to lower your expectations and open your eyes, you can lead a wonderful life just being ordinary. Instead of longing for a life you’ve seen on Instagram, you can go outside and watch the sunset where you live for free every night.
Instead of working three side hustles, you can learn to shrink your lifestyle. Your work doesn’t have to change the world or be your life’s purpose. You can work just hard enough to pay the bills and put food on the table. While working just hard enough is much harder than it used to be, it is still possible to see your work as only a slice of your life, not your whole purpose.
You can make paintings of what you can see outside your window, and never try to sell them on Etsy. Instead, you could paint for your own enjoyment, no matter how bad you are at it initially. When you have too many of your paintings around the house, you could give them away to friends and family.
I have three of my grandma’s paintings hanging in my house right now. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to come pick them up for free, let alone hang them in a museum. They aren’t bad paintings. They are just ordinary.
To me and my children, these paintings are priceless heirlooms.
There are so many things to see right where you live that you’ve yet to discover. There are flowers, birds, and buildings that are waiting for you to notice them. They may not make for a viral Instagram post, but if you open all of your senses, you will discover hidden wonder among the mundane things of your neighborhood.
You do not need to live in the countryside to find transcendence. The wonders of nature can also be found in the most crowded cities. There are plants, birds, and even rats doing wondrous things. But the sublime is not limited to nature. Human beings are also incredible creatures.
The talents of Miles Davis, a jazz musician my son and I will never know, externally as different from us as humans can be, reached out through time and transported the two of us to some magical realm that evening.
Every city I’ve ever lived in or visited has contained hidden wonders. Every person you see is a library containing dramas and comedies that far surpass anything dreamed up by even the most talented authors. You can be transfixed by a pigeon in a park as easily as you can by the Milky Way. The only difference is your willingness to stop and notice.
My first experience with living an audaciously mundane life was the pandemic. We had four kids at home, and suddenly we had lots of time together. We learned to be more creative. We invented games, played outside more, and found peace doing chores.
Instead of seeing life as an endless cycle of drudgery, we saw each day as a fresh chance to make life interesting.
Since that time, I’ve worked to maintain a sense of simplicity. I take walks in my community every day looking for signs of wonder. I always find them.
I don’t look to social media for inspiration. I am not striving to live the life of an influencer. Instead, I’m seeking the sacred in the mundane. When cooking for my family or doing the dishes, I focus on what I am doing instead of what I could be doing. I’m slowly shedding the envy and FOMO that make happiness impossible.
I also create something every day. It might be a poem or a collage. Most of the things I make are not for work or a side hustle. I create for the sheer joy of creating.
When I bring my attention to what is happening around me, I find joy in the mundane. My curiosity leads me to learn more about why the woodpeckers love to peck our chimney each spring. I notice patterns in the weather and weeds that I’ve missed, even though I’ve lived in the same place for more than twenty years.
From the outside, my life looks dull. I spend most of my day working on maintaining our home, raising children, and writing to pay the bills.
I’ve been the primary dishwasher for our family for more than fourteen years. This is a chore I used to detest, but now love. As my children have grown, it’s also a chore I get to do much less often. There is something peaceful about standing at the sink and washing off the remnants of a dinner I made that my children enjoyed without any other thoughts racing through my mind.
The more I focus on the chore instead of allowing myself to tumble into resentments, anxieties about the future, or wistful nostalgia, the easier it is to get lost in a trance. Time stops, the walls disappear, and my consciousness travels to a country that I cannot describe to you if you’ve never been there.
On days when I’m particularly mentally disciplined, I find myself in the same zone washing dishes that I usually only access when writing or drawing.
The mundane task of washing dishes becomes sublime because it is mundane.
In our home, there is always laughter. We have enough food to eat and live in one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Every day, I cook and clean, and every day I see something wonderful.
Meditation might work for you, but it never has for me. You might want to escape your life, but I have found the greatest peace comes from embracing the present reality of my life. That’s not to say there aren’t things I want to change. But I have found I can only achieve meaningful change in my life once I have come to accept the truth of my present.
You might think you need an adventure because of the weight of the mundanity of your current life. But even on a physical or spiritual adventure, you will still need to eat, void your bladder, and a million other tedious things that go with being a physical being.
Adventures are great, but they sometimes blind you to the wonder surrounding you in your normal life. The sublime is always near you, calling to you, reaching out to you in the soap bubbles in the kitchen sink, in the raindrops against the window, and in the pile of laundry on the bedroom floor.
A life of constant stimulation is not good for you physically or spiritually. You cannot sustain a life where you never get off the roller coaster. If you have ever lain awake at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this is all there is, you are being called to transcendence.
If you learn to live in the present and see what is truly happening around you, you will see the possibility for sublime moments everywhere. You take yourself with you everywhere you go. How can you be a different person when you don’t even know the person you are now?
How can you know that you need to change anything about yourself or your life if you haven’t spent time noticing what life is like in the present?
I may not ever be able to retire or visit all of the places in the world I long to see, but every day I draw breath, I can find contentment in my life and wonder in a world that is always changing, even as it rotates through the same four seasons each year.
It takes a certain kind of audacious courage to love living a mundane life. But if you’re brave enough to give up a life of endless striving and chasing hits of outrage, you can find peace and happiness in the ordinary.
You will find that if you carefully pull back the wrapper on even the most mundane task, the sublime is hiding inside, waiting for you.
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This post was a remix of two previous essays, Finding the Sublime Amid the Mundane, and Living an Audaciously Mundane Life.
