Ordinary

Why are people so afraid of an ordinary life? We are told to dream bigger, work harder, and become something more. A student should go to college. A worker should find a career. A person should keep moving upward. If someone stays in the same place for too long, we often assume that something must have gone wrong.

But what if nothing went wrong?

For Anthony, this question did not first appear as a philosophical question. It appeared as another normal day.

Anthony is a janitor.

He wakes up, goes to work, finishes what needs to be done, and eventually returns home to his mother. Tomorrow will probably look similar. The day after tomorrow may look similar too.

When I asked whether he ever wished for another kind of life, perhaps college or another career, he did not seem troubled by the question.

“It’s alright,” he said. “Not everyone are for college.”

His answer was simple, but it stayed in my mind.

Anthony did not grow up as a particularly successful student, but he was not a particularly bad one either. During school, he remained somewhere in the middle. He did what was necessary and continued forward. There were no outstanding grades that seemed to predict a great future, but there was also no complete failure.

He was simply there.

Maybe this is already unusual to write about. We like stories about the best student in the class or the student who nearly destroyed his life and then completely changed it. The middle is more difficult. There is less drama inside it.

Yet most people probably spend much of their lives somewhere in the middle.

Anthony’s childhood also contained an absence. His father left when he was young, and his mother became the person who remained.

A parent leaving does not always create one dramatic moment that explains the rest of a person’s life. Sometimes, it simply changes the shape of the home. One person is no longer there. Another person has to carry more. The child grows older inside that absence until eventually it becomes normal.

For Anthony, his mother was the person who stayed.

There was one moment during school when this became especially clear. Another student made fun of his mother. Anthony fought him.

The fight itself did not become the beginning of some larger transformation. He did not suddenly become violent, nor did the event completely change his life. It was simply one moment when something that usually remained quiet inside him came outside.

His father had already left.

His mother had not.

Perhaps that was enough to make an insult toward her feel different from an insult toward himself.

A fight is easy to judge after it happens. We can say that violence is wrong, that Anthony should have walked away, and that there were better ways to respond. All of this may be true. But actions often contain more than the action itself.

Anthony was not only responding to a sentence.

He was responding to who the sentence was about.

After school, Anthony did not continue toward college. There was no great academic plan waiting for him. Instead, he began working.

He had different jobs over the years. At one point, he worked as a server.

Serving is another kind of work that is easy not to notice. A customer sees the plate arrive, asks for another drink, pays the bill, and leaves. For the server, however, the same movement happens again and again. Walk to the table. Take the order. Carry the food. Return. Clean. Repeat.

Then the shift ends.

The next one begins later.

Anthony moved through different jobs before eventually becoming a janitor. From the outside, this may not look like progress in the way we normally describe progress. There was no great promotion at the end. No degree. No office with his name on the door.

Today, he cleans.

A janitor works around traces left by other people.

Someone drops something.

Someone walks across the floor.

Someone fills a trash can.

Someone uses a room and leaves.

Anthony arrives afterward.

He cleans what has become dirty, removes what has been left behind, and prepares the space so that other people can use it again.

Then they do.

And eventually, it becomes dirty again.

There is something strange about this kind of work. Much of it disappears almost immediately after it is completed. A clean floor does not remain clean forever. An empty trash can begins filling again. A bathroom must be cleaned knowing that tomorrow it will need to be cleaned once more.

The work does not defeat disorder permanently.

It only holds it back for a while.

Perhaps that is why Anthony’s work made me think about repetition.

We usually want our effort to lead somewhere permanent. We study because we want a degree. We save money because we want to buy something. We practice because we want to improve. We like to imagine that every action moves us closer to a final result.

But much of life does not work this way.

We eat, and later we become hungry again.

We sleep, and later we become tired again.

We clean a room, and it becomes dirty again.

We solve one problem, and another eventually appears.

Anthony’s schedule repeats itself, but maybe repetition is not the opposite of living. Maybe repetition is much of what living actually is.

When I asked whether he wanted something different, I expected his answer to contain at least some regret.

College is presented to young people as one of the major dividing points of life. Go, and one kind of future seems to open. Do not go, and people may wonder what happened.

Anthony did not seem especially interested in defending his choice.

“Not everyone are for college.”

There is something uncomfortable about this answer because it challenges an idea many of us accept without noticing.

We often treat ambition as if it is automatically good.

Wanting more means you are motivated.

Wanting less means you have given up.

But is this always true?

If someone wants a larger house, a better job, more money, and more recognition, we call that ambition. If another person works, goes home, lives with his mother, and does not expect very much beyond tomorrow, we may feel that something is missing.

Perhaps something is.

But perhaps our judgment also reveals something about us.

Anthony still lives with his mother, the same person who raised him after his father left.

When he was young, she was the person he defended in a school fight. Years later, she is still part of the life he returns to after work.

There is no dramatic reversal here. His story does not transform into the kind of story where the abandoned child becomes extraordinarily successful and one day proves something to the father who left.

That ending might be more satisfying.

But real lives do not exist for our satisfaction.

Anthony works as a janitor.

He lives with his mother.

He expects little.

That may be the story.

At first, I wanted to interpret this as a kind of sadness. Perhaps expecting little was simply another way of protecting himself from disappointment. If you do not ask much from life, then life cannot fail to give it to you.

But I am not sure this explanation is fair.

Maybe expecting little and giving up are not always the same thing.

There can also be a quiet acceptance inside it.

We live in a culture that constantly asks people what comes next. A student enters high school and is asked about college. A college student is asked about a career. Someone gets a job and is asked about promotion. Someone rents a home and is asked when they will buy one.

The future keeps demanding an answer.

What is next?

Anthony does not seem to have a dramatic answer.

Tomorrow, he will probably go to work.

Maybe that is enough for him.

This does not mean people should stop dreaming or that college does not matter. Ambition can create extraordinary things. Wanting another life can be the reason someone escapes a terrible situation or builds something that did not exist before.

But perhaps ambition should not become the only way we measure whether a life matters.

A person may never become famous.

A person may never become wealthy.

A person may never find a career that others admire.

He still wakes up.

He still works.

He still cares about someone.

He still occupies a place in the world that would be different if he were not there.

When a janitor does his work well, people often do not notice him. They notice only that the floor is clean.

Maybe ordinary lives can become invisible in the same way.

We notice the extraordinary because it asks to be noticed. We write about the person who built the company, won the prize, crossed the ocean, or changed the world.

But most people will not change the world in a way that appears in a book.

They will change smaller spaces.

A room.

A workplace.

A family.

A person beside them.

Anthony’s life does not seem to be moving toward some grand conclusion. There is no clear destination waiting at the end of his routine.

He goes to work.

He cleans what will become dirty again.

He returns home.

Then morning comes.

At first, repetition seems like the absence of a story. Nothing changes, so what is there to tell?

But perhaps repetition is also what keeps life together.

A floor has to be cleaned again because people continue walking across it.

A meal has to be made again because someone is still there to eat it.

A person wakes up again because life has continued for one more day.

Anthony expects not much from tomorrow.

Still, tomorrow comes.

And he gets up.