Jan 15 - Day 15

Today's creative offering is the lyrics to a song I am writing:

I work like the devil every hour that God will send,

Forget all my beginnings, and I let go of the end.

Paying for redemption with the sweat upon my brow,

In the now.

I have a fairly antagonistic relationship with "the now." I know it is always now, and that present-moment awareness is key and all the rest of it, but I don’t often feel that. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, working in the therapeutic or coaching space. But let’s be honest—research is often "me-search," so I don’t think I’m any different from anyone else working in wellness or personal growth. I struggle with the same things my clients do, sometimes even more.

The coaching relationship, in some ways, is a better paradigm than the psychotherapeutic one. There’s an authoritarian undercurrent to counselling—whether it’s from a psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychotherapist. It implies, "I have all the answers. Listen to me, and you shall be healed."

Sports coaching, on the other hand, accepts that many of your athletes will be better at the sport than you are. You don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to be decent at the game you both love. You can even be ordinary at it.

There’s currently a war on being ordinary. This is problematic from a creative perspective because it sets up an impossible, front-loaded mountain to climb—where you’re expected to be a specialist from the start.

The creative works I’m releasing in solidarity with my clients’ journeys are not special. They bring me face-to-face with my own ordinariness. They reveal how much I long to transcend the present moment. Peak experiences and performances are great, but most of life isn’t remotely like that—not even for the gurus in the “gurusphere.” We’re all fairly ordinary.

Great art can truly capture this sentiment. I remember going to London on holiday as a young man with a former girlfriend. She was fairly artless—her favourite genre of music was “famous.” It was never going to last.

One moment stands out: we were in the V&A Museum (which she was hating) when she became transfixed by an ancient Greek bronze statue of a naked woman.

“That is exactly, exactly what a woman looks like,” she said.

I’d never seen her moved by art before, but she was absolutely transfixed. She was right. The statue had a slight pot belly, sagging breasts, and a forlorn yet beautiful little face. It captured the essence of what even the most stunningly attractive woman looks like when she’s pottering around naked after a shower.

This girlfriend was very image-conscious; it consumed an inordinate amount of her mental energy. Yet she was touched by the sheer ordinariness of this woman, immortalised and presented in a world-class, revered space. It caught her off guard and made her feel better about herself.

There is gargantuan power in accepting ordinariness—a power the wellness industry refuses to understand. There’s a relief and contentment that can’t be found in striving to hack, grow, conquer, achieve, manifest, or anything else.

The masters tell us this again and again:

‘Here’s a bowl of fruit. Painted for you to look at in a museum because you lack the good sense to truly see your own fruit bowl at home on a random Tuesday morning. Open your eyes. See’.

Rainn Wilson, host of Soul Boom and the actor behind the archetypal Dwight Schrute in The Office, once shared advice from a therapist: true growth means being comfortable with just being another bozo on the bus.

There’s a Turin Brakes lyric that’s stayed with me:

"Pour another drink, my son,

Have another cigarette,

'Cause it’s time you realised

You’re just an average man."

This relentless need to be special, to be noteworthy, is often tethered to self-worth. Rainn’s therapist and Turin Brakes are right: probabilistically speaking, averageness is the likeliest outcome.

But this idea is a tough sell. It’s depressing to individuals and flat-out unacceptable to some cultures.

Take the hyper-individualistic culture of modern America—it’s the crucible of self-help and self-expression, and yet it cannot abide ordinariness. Therapy culture preaches acceptance, but American culture can’t help itself: it slaps “radical” in front of “acceptance.” The surface message is to “let go,” but the subtext whispers “no surrender.”

To make this point resonate, we need accessible stories, we need good, popular art. Take The Office. Dwight Schrute’s stablemates, David Brent and Andy Bernard, had to make spectacular fools of themselves in their pursuit of being someone special. Their journeys—running headlong into failure or mediocrity—are modern parables of becoming okay with being a bozo on the bus. Brent, in particular, had to try (and fail) to be Bowie before he could just be Brent.

I struggle with this massively. Just being myself. Ordinary.

The American conditioning to “just do extra” insists that you can splice ordinariness with effort and rise from its ashes as extraordinary. The sleight of hand here, so perniciously seductive, is the promise of transcendence.

Pouring another drink, lighting another cigarette—these are advertisements of ordinariness. To embrace them, even symbolically, feels like an ontological attack. Yes, you might have to function today as an ordinary person, but surely, you’re striving for more, aren’t you? If you’re not, you become alien, something to be repelled.

But gentle personal art is the antidote to this.

Be okay with being Brent. You are probably not Bowie.

Surrender—semantics aside, let it be surrender. The beauty of being a bozo on the bus is that you can sit back and look out the window. You are not, (and never have been) driving the thing.