Daily Life

Daily Life

It is such a strange phrase 'daily life' and so hard to define, yet I think it not too difficult for any one of us to answer its questions, so much so that our concern almost wholly lies not with its particulars, but with the stress of living up to that phrase alone.  Long ago we had our rituals and sacred rites to grasp a part of this mysterious obscurity, and there where those things existed, a silent understanding brought clarity to their existence.  But the broad reach that this phrase now encompasses is only apparent by the image it holds and not by the clarity that it brings to other aspects of our lives.

We see the things that we must do daily, but then almost instantly memory and imagination take on their roles of interpreter, so that the longer we seem to look at those tasks, or the more we do them, the more they become transformed.  If we could become aware of change without sinking into the change itself, we would learn stability without losing the importance of our role as humans.

But before we know it, the truly taxing method of our lives has already taken hold of us: the day becomes divided up according to real or unreal needs, the nourishment of mind and body, and then that of slumber, and we have not seen anything but the far-fetched and constant repetition of our bodies moving through the motions.  If we take the image of ourselves out of this, however, then the word ceases to exist; we learn that concepts and ideas are only there because of our relation to them; we perpetuate what is perpetuated for us, we look at what has already been looked at, we hear what has already been heard.  Daily life is perhaps not about reproducing or perpetuating what has already happened, but about seeing what happens without the identity of the person seeing.

Douglas Thornton