The panel in front of me looked straight out of a J. Crew photoshoot. Third from the right, a man in a navy suit shifted in his seat before clearing his throat.
“If you can remember one thing, it’s what my friend told me before I left home: don’t let the extraordinary become ordinary.”
The man speaking was a White House Fellow, also known as a very accomplished adult who was chosen to take a mid-career break and work in the White House for a year instead. Just an intern in D.C. myself, I nonetheless found myself nodding along to what he was saying. It was the beginning of June, back when I was still pinching myself every time I passed the White House and the city remained largely undiscovered to me.
But when I talked to people who had lived in D.C. for a while, I saw how easily the city’s rich history could fade into the background of their day-to-day routine. An once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the inside of the White House was now navy-suit-man’s everyday commute.
He wanted to make a point to not take extraordinary experiences for granted, but I think this advice also applies to everyday life. David Foster Wallace argued a similar thing in his famous commencement speech, “This is Water”:
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How's the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”
Wallace’s lesson is about simple awareness. He believes that there are two ways to live: either constantly making the effort to pay attention to the world around you, or slipping into the “default setting” – a rat race where you become numb to being alive. It takes discipline to stay conscious and alive, as he says, day in and day out; but if we manage to reject our default settings, it can breathe new life into the everyday banalities we dread.
Navy-suit-man and Wallace’s advice does not seem groundbreaking. It may even sound a little morbid. But us college students about to settle into 9-5 jobs or graduate school run the risk of letting classes, work and routine dull the shine of how remarkable it is to be alive. Random things will kindly remind me of this, like when someone’s laugh punctuates a quiet room or when I can hear my heartbeat at night or when I think too hard about how FaceTime works.
But, as I have also struggled with, it’s very easy to just go through the motions of everyday life — to function on autopilot rather than to keep a sense of wonder and actively practice gratitude. The dome becomes just another thing you pass on your way to class, Mary from Econ just another person you sit next to every Monday/Wednesday, the dining hall just another place you say hi to (and avoid) people.
Instead, I challenge you to combat this with a seemingly trivial tactic: pretend your life is just beginning. That’s how most movies usually work — you enter during the middle of the character’s life and are forced to piece together the story through exposition. It’s a concept called "in medias res" or “in the middle of things,” where the viewer is dropped in the midst of action with no prior context. There’s an abundance of curiosity when you “begin in the middle” as you observe the character’s work, relationships, struggles and hopes. While it’s just the character’s everyday life, to the viewer, it’s like a playground of life experiences to explore.
The cool thing is, as humans with our own storyline, we get to “begin in the middle” everyday. We have the ability to treat every day as a brand new proposition, our life an eccentric privilege that we’re just now taking advantage of.
So, I challenge you to take a step back, observe your life from an outsider’s perspective and recognize the extraordinary aspects of your life that you currently find ordinary. I don’t care if this means pretending you’re drinking coffee for the first time in your life or blasting your favorite song like you’ve never heard it before. This is your life. This is water.
If you’re walking around bored, you’re not paying attention.
Allison Elshoff is a junior studying Business Analytics with minors in the Hesburgh Program of Public Service and Impact Consulting. Originally from Valencia, California and currently living in Badin Hall, you can find her unsubscribing from email lists or hammocking by the lakes. You can contact Allison at aelshoff@nd.edu.
