Choosing Again What I Chose Before
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
I read a line once from G.K. Chesterton about “exulting in monotony.” “Because children have abounding vitality,” he writes, “because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”
He was right about that. I’m not strong enough. Monotony wears me out, grinds me down. It takes something that is in reality elevated and precious and quite beautiful, and makes it more and more mundane: the presence of my husband. The breeze coming through my window. The appearance of my dog. The antics of my children. When I am around these things all the time, I stop really seeing them, the way I stop feeling the pressure of the watch on my wrist.
Monotony makes us blind to the value of what surrounds us. The very choosing of something, over and over again, veils the importance of that choice. Repetition obscures significance. That is why those choices take perseverance: making the same choices whether we feel like it or not, because we have committed to doing so, because we know on some substratum level that it is important. We give that bath, vacuum that floor, walk that dog, listen to that patient.
But occasionally the value of what we’re doing breaks through. Wendell Berry puts it well in this poem he wrote for his wife, entitled “The Wild Rose”:
Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,and once more I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.
I heard about an interview where a parent said they used to see bathing their kids as a chore, but now that their kids are grown, they would give anything to have them go back to being four years old again, being given a bath just one more time. We see these things better in retrospect, but rare and precious is the awareness that flares in the present: that hidden in all the daily customs are the most precious things of all.
