The Saving Grace of the Everyday

The day after the Marathon bombings in Boston, I was intrigued by something while watching the news. I was not taken up by the repeated more and more of what was not known and not even subject to an educated guess as all the promises were made to get to the bottom of all of this and to bring the perpetrators to justice and all the things that have to be said on such occasion. This is all predictable and part of reassuring a panicked public that there is nothing to panic about, that the authorities are on it. And they were, with almost television espionage and crime scene series efficiency, as the events of only a couple of days later demonstrated.

What caught my attention was a number of person-in-the-street and people-going-about-their-daily-routines stories. In particular, there was a couple opening their coffee shop for the regular morning traffic of regular morning customers, with apparently no expectation that the customers would not be there. And there they were.

It was a reminder of an idea I sometimes work with in Popular Culture courses, the grounding of our sense of the spectacular and sensational in our sense not so much of the “normal,”which is a concept that gets stretched and redefined with every experience (even a traumatic one such as the bombing), but of the ordinary routines we call the “everyday.”

Sociology, of course, has debates going on about this, with names like De Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Living) and Lefebvre (Critique of Everyday Life) the names I encounter most often (not being a specialist in the field, I get the ones most often cited in my field of literary cultural studies).  But the looks on the faces of the people in Boston just getting up and going back to work was such a graphic image of some of the principles in action. They needed to hold to routine, and looked more surprised that they were being quizzed about it than that they were doing it.

The issue is, as explained in an article by Michael Gardiner from Western, in the journal Cultural Studies, is the matter of habit—not as a dull  daily grind but as a set of what are in fact skilled accomplishments that serve as a grounding  “mode of relating to the world acquired in specific contexts” (“Everyday Utopianism”: 2004: 235). It’s the kind of grounding that among other things allows people, in words I modify only slightly from Kipling, to keep their heads when all about them are losing theirs, and blaming it on everyone else around them—especially the calm.

Routine, it seems, does not turn us into dehumanized robots. 

Routine is part of the very thing that makes us individuals. We do not live a standard shared routine (houses made of ticky-tacky notwithstanding). We each of us have our own routines, quirks, and learned preferences. It provides, as Gardiner summarizes from the work of Rita Felski, an “anchor of personal meaning” in a world with apparently less and less certainty and apparently more and more randomness. Anthony Giddens called this need (in a usefully polysyllabic way) “ontological security”: it has to do (if my digest of a digest of a summary has it more or less correct) with developing a stable sense of who we are as individual “selves,” and giving ourselves something to trust in when we need to believe there is something predictable out there to begin from. The routine, the everyday, oddly enough, can even provide the foundation for resisting what would otherwise feel like uncontrolled or outwardly imposed change. 

Understoon this way, the everyday, the routine, smacks of “paradigm”: it is a frame of reference we develop over time and out of repetition, so engrained we just take it for granted as our daily business, and get ourselves back to a reasonable semblance of it as soon as possible after a marked disruption. 

In that sense, the everyday can be a life-saver. Or a sanity saver.

It can also be a trap. Demobilized troops coming home from combat, after being sent off to make the world a better place, used to be told (and maybe still are, but through a better decompression system of PTSD counselling), “Time to get things back to normal,”  with an implication “normal” meant back to the routine of daily civilian life. 

And bless them, after WWI and WWII and all the other massive deployments of blood and bone for the good of us all, they tried, and still try. I wonder if those who could not get it all back, or who could and can at best pretend to for only so long before the floodgates of nightmare reopen, felt and continue to feel themselves failures because they could not get into a routine “ontologically secure” enough to frame and contain the selves they had found themselves to be when survival depended on it. 

Their ordinary, everyday selves just could not create routine solid enough to anchor them safely once they had learned what their out-of-the-ordinary selves were capable of.