The dailiness of life

There’s a line in Train’s Marry Me that sums up something I think about all the time: marry me … today and every day.   Even the biggest things in life – marriage, motherhood, career – are built of a tiny little daily moments.  Each moment is as insubstantial on its own as a snowflake but in aggregate they become as solid and immovable as a snowbank.  A glacier.  We build our lives – our commitments, our desires, our identities – through quotidian acts that can feel infinitessimal and meaningless as we enact them.

Of course there are undeniable moments and decisions that shape us.  We can all reflect on the application we put in the mail or the date we said yes to or the job interview we went into enthusiastically or the day we looked at the two lines on the pregnancy test.  Even in this case though, as Kelly wrote beautifully this week, and as I’ve mused before, we don’t always know the big definining moment as we live it.  As Agnes de Mille says, “No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our lives are made. Destiny is made known silently.”

But the truth is that most of life happens in the current of dailiness, whose slight and invisible variations are nevertheless enough to carve enormous swooping oxbows into the terrain of our souls.  These currents, these slight moments of everyday-ness, so many unnoticed, pile up and we find ourselves in a life.  I remember for me it was the day I bought a station wagon.  At that point I had a husband, a daughter, a house, an MBA, a job, but somehow it was the station wagon that made me sit up and realize: I am a grown-up.  Wow.  Of course I’d been tiptoeing into that identity for a long time, minute by invisible minute, but then I looked around, triggered by the car, and saw what I’d built.

I’ve become exquisitely sensitized to those small snowflakes of moments now, have bounced to the other extreme where I can hardly see the snowbanks for my attention to every single particle that comprises them.  I guess this is on my mind because I’m heading out tomorrow morning for a week of work.   I am preemptively sad, already missing my children and the very mundane details of this ordinary existence.

Addendum:

My ever-wise sister Hilary, responding to this post, send me the following poem this morning.  Notably, it was read at Launa’s wedding.  I adore it.

Well Water

What a girl called “the dailiness of life”
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
“Since you’re up . . .” Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

Randall Jarrell

16 thoughts on “The dailiness of life”

  1. Oh, Lindsey! I can’t believe you posted this today… a day when the squirrel-wheel is turning so squeakingly chez nous…

    And all I want is a big gulp of well water. I keep forgetting that all I have to do is open my mouth and drink, dammit.

    Thank you thank you thank you. (And how did Hilary remember this???? You and she are amazing.)

  2. Love this post. So easy to forget the little details when you’re in the moment, and yet so hard to leave them behind when faced with other commitments. 🙁 Safe and happy work travels. xo

  3. There are those daily little moments and there are pivotal points. Was just discussing with my husband about his personal to me in the school newspaper back when we were in college was one such point. Things would be different had he not done that; very different I think.

  4. So very true. I especially like where you said “Each moment is as insubstantial on its own as a snowflake but in aggregate they become as solid and immovable as a snowbank. A glacier.” This really hits home today and makes me appreciate the little things.

  5. This is lovely! The wonderful thing about small children is their consistent dailiness.

    I envy your station wagon. When Gus was born, I needed a new car and bought a Prius, thinking that I wouldn’t surrender to a mom-mobile. Now I covet every minivan I see …

    xoxo

  6. This is so true and spot on! As the mom of (now teen/young adult) kids, the fiercest, happiest, sweetest memories are of all the small daily things we did together….as you say: the mundane details are the ones you will surely miss the most. For they are the very sweetest of all.

    Your post also reminded me of a poem I first heard read on Writer’s Almanac when my daughter was very young. It still brings tears to my eyes because it really sums up motherhood so well.

    To A Daughter Leaving Home
    by Linda Pastan

    When I taught you
    at eight to ride
    a bicycle, loping along
    beside you
    as you wobbled away
    on two round wheels,
    my own mouth rounding
    in surprise when you pulled
    ahead down the curved
    path of the park,
    I kept waiting
    for the thud
    of your crash as I
    sprinted to catch up,
    while you grew
    smaller, more breakable
    with distance,
    pumping, pumping
    for your life, screaming
    with laughter,
    the hair flapping
    behind you like a
    handkerchief waving
    goodbye.

  7. Beautiful. And so true. Those “big moments”—so anticipated and dreamed about–often fail to leave a permanent mark. Its the things that happen over and over, without planning or even much thought, that really shape me and change me.

  8. I love the idea of tiptoeing into adulthood. For me, the realization that I had arrived at this station came when faced with the extreme sleep deprivation of having a newborn, and still having to operate and be “on” around the clock. There was no one else to do it for me.

    And given the demands of parenthood, and the lack of what the world would call monumental moments, I try to embrace the beautiful ordinary-ness of life, too.

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