Of Sameness and Simplicity

Often we tell ourselves what we will do tomorrow. But as to today, it comes and goes so swiftly⎯so swiftly that we sometimes wonder if we’re doing much of anything that is solid and significant. And in reaction, we sometimes rush and reach without too much discrimination as to what it is we rush and reach for.
Part of our problem perhaps is that we suppose that something different or dramatic is expected of us, and we overlook much of the meaning of the routine things done each day, the things of which life is made up for most of us.
Not many of us make headlines⎯fortunately. Not many of us find ourselves in the midst of major dramatic events. And even those who do⎯even their lives are mostly made up of small things, of daily work, of going and coming, of routine tasks.
The signing of the Declaration of Independence was a dramatic moment of incalculable consequence⎯but the men who signed it spent much of their lives in somewhat routine tasks.
Lincoln has been much dramatized: his life, his death, his simple stirring thoughts. But his life was not one great crescendo. There were rail-splitting, and learning to read and write, the paying of debts, and the hard labor of learning to be a lawyer.
The storybooks and the dramas of historic happenings catch mostly the high color of condensation in covering a life, or a century, or an age, or an era, in an hour or two of time. But often what they fail to tell is the long length of learning, the routine work, the pain and the patience, the coming, and the going, and all the in between times. And when we tire of routine and of the sameness of our surroundings, we would well remember that there can be much of meaning in simplicity⎯ and in some sameness.
As David Grayson said it, “This I know well: that the chief part of every life consists of small things… Blessed is the man who can enjoy the small things, the common beauties, the little day-by-day events; sunshine on the fields, birds on the bough, breakfast, dinner, supper, the daily paper on the porch, a friend passing by. So many people who go afield for enjoyment leave it behind them at home.”
What if today, this month or this season, does go swiftly, and what if in it there is some simple sameness, blessed are we if running through that sameness is the love of loved ones, and friends, with the assurance that such simple and most meaningful things of life are everlasting.