When it is my shift (we take it in turns) to put Smallsteps to bed, I read her books. We have read many, several series, and across various genres, and now we are reading the last we have in the shelf of Roald Dahl's books, Flying Solo. This is one I haven't read before and while it isn't aimed at adults, it is not aimed at children either, as it is an autobiography of part of his adult life.
At the start of the book there is a short prologue and an excerpt of it is used as the book's blurb. When we read the prologue when we first began, we spent a few minutes discussing what this part of it means, as it stood out to me and I wanted to highlight it.
He goes on to say that in this book there are more of the great incidents, otherwise it would be boring. And as true as that is for a book, I wanted to emphasise that while there will be great incidents, most of life is not great, it is small. Life is lived daily and most of the time, nothing special is happening. There is no highlight, no holiday, no promotion, no lottery win, no proposal or marriage and no miracles. Most days of our life, most moments of our life, are extraordinarily ordinary.
Yet, we have been programmed to avoid the ordinary at all cost, because the worst thing we can be, is bored. Rather than paying attention to all of the daily ordinary, many of us are scrolling past life until a great incident arrives. Scrolling past the pretty smile on the bus, scrolling past the laughing baby, scrolling past the sunset.
Missing all the small incidents, while the nose is pressed into a field of pixels.
The sights, the sounds, the experiences of daily living might not actually be that boring, if we switch our perspective a little. For instance, we probably all know some people (or are these people) who make mountains out of molehills, and invest themselves completely into the drama, despite nothing really important happening. Older people tend to do this stereotypically more, but I think that the internet culture encourages it also. It is compelling to be interested, to be expectant, to be anxiously waiting for something to happen, and the digital feeds feed into this desire, returning little of value for the time invested.
Yet many of us feel we are missing out, if we aren't scrolling.
The irony is that as life passes by all around us, we have closed ourselves off to the experience. Worse than that, many often actively avoid living, because it is too messy, too unpredictable, too scary, and makes us too anxious. We'd rather be in the safe bubble of our screen, being fed what we have asked for, hearing what we agree with, and consuming an endless stream of avoidance material.
I wonder what someone like Roald Dahl would think of the culture today. A person who not only had a colourful childhood filled with a lot of tragedy as well as humour, but as an adult travelled the world, fought in wars, got shot down in his fighter only to get back in another once recovered, and the list goes on. A life full of colour, all experienced with an observant eye, and an open mind.
How many of us can truly say we are open to experience?
In this book he writes about some great incidents, but what is clear across all of his books, is that he is an observer and connoisseur of the extraordinary ordinary. His characters, the situations, the way he is able to in the most outrageous circumstances, connect with the audience on a familiar level. We all know people who are cruel and kind, bullies and doormats, personalities and wallflowers, and he is able to bring our own relationships into the pages of his books. Because while there are many extraordinary incidents scattered throughout the stories, they are packed in between a lot of ordinary.
Like life.
Small incidents should never be ignored by experience.
Taraz
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