I have started recognising and anticipating the familiar bumps in the road as I commute into work on my bike. I can tell you which traffic light will turn red as I approach it and which one of them I can skip (safely, lol) and get away with it. When I cycle back home and it’s dark, I have developed this impulse to look through the window of The Scolt Head pub to a table that I once sat with a friend almost 5 years ago. For some reason, I have to look at it, otherwise my commute doesn’t feel right.
There you have it, I wrote a paragraph about my mundane commute into work. Part neurotic, but mostly incredibly boring. I can’t even bring myself to show this activity off on my Strava - I routinely upload it to get my stats but hide it from my feed as I definitely don’t think people want to see my monotonous, repetitive commute to work.
I’ve been pondering this concept of the mundane for a few months now. In the last couple of years, my life has been shaped by routine more so than ever; compared to almost everyone I know in this day and age, I need to be physically in the office every day. I’ve realised that I actually thrive off routine, but the journey of getting there has meant that I’ve embraced the repetitive nature of my everyday life, albeit reluctantly at first.
It’s kind of obvious, but if you think about it, we share that feeling of boredom and mundanity with everyone that has ever existed. All of us do a lot of boring things that we don’t really share with each other, but they probably take up most of our waking lives. I found freedom in that idea, as this concept is embarrassingly familiar to us all. Adulthood consists of constant repetition mixed with snippets of time that we look forward to that form a relief to the cycle, but then those end and we’re back to mundanity again.
Part of the mundane are chores, the idea of domesticity. In Poland, there’s this phrase called “kura domowa” which literally means “home hen.” It describes, traditionally, women who put the needs of others (usually their children and family) before their own, stuck doing domestic chores and never leaving the house. Understandably, this may be viewed as negative and limiting (which it often can be), but I feel as though part of this experience becomes inevitable for some of us. How do we then find meaning in the mundane? How do we embrace it?
I finally read Miranda July’s All Fours book in February that loads of people have been talking about online this past year. Apart from the intense horniness of it which was utterly hilarious, I was struck by how the book, amongst many other things, felt like a search for meaning. A successful middle aged person, with a seemingly good life, albeit with a lot of trauma around the birth of her baby, felt like she needed an escape from her mundane and often boring life and stable relationship. She said “I had not even been the only one knotted in miserly pain; that was part of the ride. Resistance, then giving in.” Life can be suffocating. The protagonist hid her problems by being immersed in her creative work, but she hit a wall. Her personal life needed to change, she felt trapped by it. It affected her senses, her self-control, her decisions.
When I was weaving my foot piece which is part of The Textile Cyborg series, I was making two panels mirroring each other that would form both sides of the foot. My design reference was a specific section of a pastel drawing. I ended up looking at those same exact marks, movements and motions as I wove those pieces - for hours. At first I questioned why I didn’t make more preparatory drawings, but eventually this exercise became way more rewarding than I anticipated. I ended up enjoying the repetitiveness of it. I looked at the same information from a different perspective and noticed new details in something that felt very familiar. As a result, it ended up being one of my favourite pieces of weaving for this project.
To me, it feels human to battle the mundane and attempt to find freedom in our situations. This isn’t anything new, but being bored or coming against limitations helps us to dig into our imaginations and unleashes creativity that we didn’t think was there. As a result, we often come across an idea that excites us and helps us think in a way that we wouldn’t have been able to access before if we were not in the depths of mundanity.
As I cycled to work on Friday, I looked up and saw the reflection of the blue sky on a boring office building. It filled my heart with a warmth and excitement that has lacked for a while in these cold and dark winter months. The beauty in the everyday is around us all the time, we just have to be brave enough to search for it.