This week the most extraordinary thing that can happen to anyone abroad happened. I led an ordinary life! By ordinary I mean the accumulation of little choices, errands, and incidents that make up daily life. In a way, these things are 日用品, or daily necessities. We don’t always need to visit a temple hours out of town. Sometimes chatting with a friend brings just as much, if not more, joy and fulfillment. Wednesday I went to the bank; what a normal thing to do! Later that day I took a walk. I think at some point I killed a bug. It’s like how much more bland could it get? And the answer is none, none more bland! Yet I enjoyed the normalcy for the simple fact that these are the things that make up life no matter where in the world you happen to be.
As a part of the assimilation I’m attempting I avoided all of my own music this week, instead choosing to listen to Chinese radio (where an early morning Willy Nelson tune isn’t quite as uncommon as you’d think). I decided to forego my American way of keeping writing utensils, opting for the very Asian mode of a cutesy pencil case stuffed with supplies. While it sounds more like petty amusement than assimilation I think it’s things like pencil cases that help me put all the big issues into perspective.
Confucius mentioned putting more blame on yourself than others for ‘all faults.’ I put this to the test this week. I found that paired with the lovely also comes the “small stuff” that usually produces buckets of sweat.
Let’s go back to the bank Wednesday. I went to the bank hoping to deposit a check into my account. First I take a number. No surprise, there are forty-three people in front of me. So I wait. When my number is called I take out the check I had written during a prior attempt. The teller asks me for my passport. “Good sign,” I think. Last time they said I needed to go to a higher branch without bothering to ask for my passport. Soon, however, there is a discussion about how I wrote my name in print in one place, but signed in the other. I explained that away, but someone said the real problem was that my middle name was not fully written out. So I tried to just fill it in on the written check, but no such luck. They said to use my other (also my last) check to rewrite it. While I’m writing they tell me that it will take two months to deposit the check unless I go to a higher branch. “Higher, of course,” I think.
After a fruitless hour I leave in a much fouler mood than when I arrived. But instead of letting it brood I ask myself, “what am I truly angry over?” The answer came as usual, that it was a buildup of issues. But “what was my fault and what could I not control?” I ask. I start from the beginning. First, I should not have written the check prior to going to the bank. Just that one small matter of doing things the Chinese way over my way would have saved, not one check, but two. I couldn’t help the long line or the two-month waiting period, but getting over the wasting of two checks, which was my mistake, helped me put the whole experience up to, well, experience. It took the twenty-minute bike ride home to think this through. Twenty short minutes compared to a whole afternoon wasted on a flared temper and all the energy required keeping it up.
Throughout the whole week I had small frustrations arise. That’s normal, just as normal as taking a walk or killing a bug. But the major difference is the turnaround back to the Middle Road, or the Way. The perspective I choose to keep all depends on my perspective of me. Am I ordinary or extraordinary? There’s a quote from a great movie that asks, “I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?” Is it ever possible to just be ordinary? I think so. Ordinary is the new extraordinary, but any connoisseur of the little things in life already knows that.
