1.2 Enforcing the Mundane.
The days are not always beautiful, they are made beautiful by the walking. I take pictures. I have noticed that I seem to take the same photos of the same places and the same things; the mundane. But they are never the same. I realized one morning that what I was really photographing was light. Light and shadows, chiaroscuro, the interplay between light and shadows. The beautiful.
I went to school with a guy named Bob. One day he mused about a professor we shared. He said, respectfully, that the professor was an enforcer of the mundane. He supported mundanity. I think that we tend to think of Work, our Job, our Career, our Calling or Vocation, as enforcing the mundane, the everyday. We see work as a grind, TGIF.
It seems that the everyday necessities of our life and work get in the way of our ability to achieve our goal of working towards our dream. Our days are filled with mundane tasks. According to Marcus Buckingham in The Truth About You, and the StrengthsFinder research, only 20% of people are using their strengths every day at work.
Architect Christopher Alexander is credited with developing the concept of community patterns, primarily in his shared work on A Pattern Language. He suggests that both the mundane and the magnanimous are related:
“...when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.”
Small, everyday things; chores, are connected to the grander realms of greatness. Work is about capturing the beauty in the mundane, not only capturing it but revelling in it, and sharing that beauty with others.
The mundane is seen as that which is dull and unexciting, the earthly rather than the heavenly. But that view is less about reality and more about our perspective on reality. If we set a goal for ourselves in our work, we need to avoid the tendency to make that strictly about the idea of our paid job. Perhaps our work, or our calling, is to respond to the beauty in the mundane, wherever and whenever, to capture light and to share it with others.
A template that might help you to work on your goal can be seen HERE.
An MS Word version of the document can be downloaded HERE.