At some point, you’ve definitely stared at the ceiling fan above, not really thinking, but somehow thinking a lot. Maybe you’ve walked the same road for the hundredth time and suddenly noticed a crack in the pavement that’s been there forever. Weird, right? How some things seem to be a part of your daily life but somehow… still aren’t. This edition of Unarchive is about that. The glitch in your automated life. As you move through your busy schedule, everything starts to revolve around finding a meaning, but maybe there isn’t one at all. And maybe that’s okay.
Presence of the ordinary
When was the last time you truly noticed your daily life? Marcel Proust said it best: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” There are times that the road never seems to end, specially on days you are late. The grumpy street cat that meows its way to your doorstep everyday for food. The unexpected rain that pours when you forget your umbrella at home. We sink into the cushions and blur it all away over a cup of tea and add them to life's minor inconveniences. But have you ever noticed how weirdly that feels when one day this very insignificant routine of ours gets disrupted? That's how our minds are shaped. We tend to only think of post-worthy milestones and the hyped occurrences that everyone talks about. But life isn't a grand frame to fit only the big pieces. It is rather a collage of hundreds and thousands of miniscule moments that pass by us every second that gives shape and structure to our lives. In these moments we discover our very existence and consciousness. We pass by these moments without really being in them. We follow the common notion of "go with the flow" like most of the folks out there. But when these little formations that script our daily happenings are broken , it is then that we find ourselves coming to a pause, even if it is for just a second. But it's fine. You don't need to figure anything out or make any meaningful correlation to yourself out of it. That is not the point here. Maybe all this in its usual sense doesn't even point towards anything. Yet after tiny reflections you find a meaning of all this in your lives. We are always taught to focus on the important but what we rather do is brush off the unnecessary like how we tune out the background noise. Get the difference? Sometimes those are the things where our answers lie, in those spaces, in those things that are overshadowed by the prominent. You don't need to understand anything you see, you just need to know that you are actually looking at it. “In the details, we find the divine.”