Towalk. To repeatedly put one foot in front of the other.To surrender to the rhythm of the movement while listening to a beautifully monotonous track of music. To feel the blood being slowly pumped around the body. The warmth that starts to spread. The simplicity of just moving forward, slowly and steadily. The natural cleanse of the myriad of thoughts that are too often present. Bliss.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said: “Gå, så går det ok,” which translates to, “Walk, then everything will be just fine.”
And, I couldn’t agree more.
Whenever life overwhelms me, the simplicity of walking, of repeatedly putting one foot in front of the other, of surrendering to the rhythms in my body, focusing on every breath and my pulse, and the contentment of moving slowly forward tends to ground me.
Nourishing, fulfilling rhythms are a predominant part of a life worth sustaining. Filling one’s daily life with activities and tasks that are meaningful and rewarding establishes a desire to continuously engage, and ignites a reluctance to view daily tasks as trivial chores. Experiencing one’s duties and tasks as fulfilling and satisfying is partly dependent on making a conscious choice not to engage in pseudo work, and partly on a mindset of taking responsibility for one’s choices and actions.
Cherishing daily rituals, allowing for time to contemplate, valuing both the repetitions and the changes of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rhythms creates coherency and resilience in life. Just as nature, a sustainable, resilient life should embrace cycles and allow for periods of speed and abundance and slow ones.
Anourishing way of viewing daily chores, preparing meals, getting dressed, tidying up, washing dishes, etc., is to looks at such activities as rituals, and allowing for them to take the time they take.
Resilient living is definitely not an ode to dishwashing, which sometimes seems to be the case of slow living, but still, exercising a calm, peaceful mind while carrying out daily tasks that might not seem immediately fulfilling or rewarding can make such tasks feel like the chorus of one’s daily hymn.
A life without a chorus is a life that consists of disjointed marvels, which might be sparkly and fancy but lack nourishing consistency.
Inviting cycles and circularity into one’s life, and replacing a linear, growth-focused approach to one’s professional and personal time is crucial when striving to live a resilient, and sustainable life.
Circularity involves rhythms and nourishing rituals; it involves regularities, consistency, and decay, revitalisation, degeneration, and regeneration.
How does the notion on rhythms and daily rituals combine with the previous discussion on impermanence as a crucial characteristic of the most resilient design-object?
Daily rhythms may seem to be an antonym of impermanence, however, to celebrate life’s nourishing repetitions does not mean to forcefully hold to familiarity and traditions or seek stability above all else. Rather, even though the above-mentioned chorus of our days is important in establishing rhythms and a sense of belonging or hominess, it doesn’t mean that we should pursue stagnation.
On the contrary, nourishing repetitions are characterised by developing our minds and bodies. Nourishing repetitions are anti-trivial. Being faithful to what one is passionate about is a way of celebrating the nourishing repetitions of life. To dig deeper into a topic and to engage again and again in explorations of a theme in order to discover all the different layers is an activity characterised by repetitions and iterations, and is one of the most fulfilling repetitive acts in the world.
Toengage in a sustainable lifestyle implies surrounding oneself with fewer but better things, reducing consumption, and choosing well and ethically when purchasing anything.
One must be prepared to repeatedly use — and choose to find pleasure in using — the same items, and in engaging in daily rhythms and rituals.
However, it seems that our late-modern cultural consensus is reluctant of repetition. Repetition is considered trivial and exasperating, and continuity is generally viewed as synonymous with dullness and elongation. Changeability, innovation, novelty — as well as the act of upgrading one’s belongings to new, high-performance products — is considered thrilling, even titillating.
Of course, repetition, if linked to monotonous routine work is draining and trivial. But finding beauty and satisfaction in daily repetitions, the daily chorus, can be aesthetically nourishing, and can be the key to a more fulfilling and more sustainable lifestyle in allegiance with one’s core values.
Investing in only a few good and nourishing things is a crucial effort in order to minimise the over-consumption of irrelevant, pollutive, short-lived things — and it is something we can all do.
Professor of Philosophy Yuriko Saito operates in her book Everyday Aesthetics with a term that she calls the familiar strange.
The familiar strange can be described as a gem-like aesthetic quality discretely hidden behind the mundane façade of familiar objects. This could be the beautiful lining in a bag that evokes pleasure every time the bag is opened, intriguing tactile elements in a piece of furniture that ensure tactile inducements, multifunctional elements in kitchenware that ensures flexibility, or a chair that instantly appears heavy but is made out of a very light material that triggers our senses.
However, even though there can be a lot of reasons to charge a design object with strangeness and thereby momentarily “force” the recipient out of the comfort of familiarity, which could for instance be done to applaud the edifying challenges of life, some objects should emphasise and celebrate the rewarding, non-trivial rhythms that our human lives are built around.
Saito argues that by seeking the familiar strange or pursuing to embed ordinary, everyday things with gem-like aesthetic qualities, thereby attempting to overcome the triviality of monotonous daily life, “we also pay the price of compromising the very everydayness of everyday”. By this statement, Saito emphasises the quality and beauty of everydayness.
Everydayness can connote triviality and insignificance. But in Saito’s use of the term, the everydayness of everyday implies the on-going satisfaction of a fulfilling everyday life, and the pleasure of being accompanied by everyday objects that support nourishing rhythms and habits or that beautify the daily chorus.
When leading an everyday life that nourishes and fulfils us, we don’t have the need to flee from everydayness through aesthetician pleasure hunts or over-consumption.
Establishing a nourishing, rewarding everyday rhythm is crucial when striving to live sustainably and to reduce one’s consumption of feel-good, quick-kick trendy things. Not everything should be extraordinary, amazing, and dramatic; no one would be able to cope with constant intensity and drama.
The vast majority of our lives consist of the rhythms and regularities of everyday life: working, cooking, eating, relaxing, gardening, exercising, socialising with family and friends, transporting oneself from a–b, and, of course, sleeping. Most of the objects we surround ourselves with should support those rhythms, and perhaps even improve them or sustain them, emphasise them and beautify them by embedding them with aesthetic nourishment in the shape of tactility, flexibility, and inclusiveness, or as Saito eloquently puts it:
“Thus, whether regarding history, landscape, objects, or experiences, the ordinary and mundane that are often overlooked need to receive equal attention as the dramatic and extraordinary.”
…
Let’s connect! https://www.instagram.com/the_immaterialist/
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS. Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
 |
 |
 |
 |
—–
Photo credit: Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
