DETOURS: The unfamiliar life

by Tinashe Jakwa

On finding beauty in what is familiar.

***

There is a story that speaks loudly of its merits and truth. It is a living and breathing story. Borne out of the desire to escape the mundanity of day-to-day living, the story presents itself as a panacea for the trials and tribulations characteristic of lives stolen by the drudgery of the everyday. Knock, knock, knock it sounds, leading anxious bodies into the fray. The story speaks of greener pastures located in faraway places so distant from our homes they become dreams hiding in the minutiae of elsewhere. These dreams are neither here nor there, yet there is where they ordinarily dwell. Here, there is no colour or fragments impressive enough to be of interest, titillating one’s senses and worthy enough to stimulate the mind. We fall asleep. Life comes and passes akin to the mindfulness with which we are told to disregard the anxieties and stresses of the conscious mind. The story is exploratory, always concerned with happenings in locales, households, schools, workplaces, hearts and minds outside of what is familiar. It is a seductive story that informs many people’s ideas of success, for we all must flee. Ourselves, others, and our environment. This is demonstrable by how easily we assimilate the story into our lives and their cascading horizons. There is no beauty here, only unremarkable expanses of the heart. Those long pauses and empty reveries. Deep sighs and forbidden hues. The dancing miasma of unbegotten lust for that which is distant and can only be pined for at a distance.

This is how the story goes. It whispers and dances on the tongue as desire twists and turns on the mind leaving echoes of new horizons etched on the pinnacle of another tomorrow. We peer through glass windows and cellular phones, enticed by the delights our voyeuristic gazes may only hope to glimpse. This story, of this and generations past, but perhaps especially present generations, is one of wanderlust and encounter with novelty and the never-ending sense of adventure that strips the everyday of its allure. Such wanderlust is not only signified by the desire to cavort with distant places. No, it is a daydream about the unrealised possibility of us which haunts the halls and corridors of one’s waking hours. It is spilt milk sashaying along the edge of kitchen countertops. It is long breaths that echo traumas of a thousand generations. The call of “what if” and the regret that laces its contours. That dastardly glance into the future and the fear of what one might find. Dirty socks and underwear strewn on cork floors, a mockery of one’s unbecoming. In our minds and in our thoughts, through our fault, through our most grievous fault, we surrender our hopes for the present to the past and future, distant as they are from our longing. We wander through the landscape of possibility, just as we might flee to lands faraway, a salve for unhealing wounds. The story foments restless disengagement with one’s environment, the people and encounters we experience therein. This wanderlust of the travelling mind pertains largely to the general disposition that one takes towards life. The interest with which one gazes upon their home or surroundings. The desire and arousal of the senses. The refusal to country hop recognising that one’s body and all that it promises, is the first and last country whose borders one will truly traverse. These borders. They permit us the opportunities to consort with the world, stealing moments and courting the familiar scents and shades of the colourful and colourless edges of a mystical world. This is what the story disguises. Errant thoughts and thoughtless minds. Tick, tick, tick before every moment is lost.

The story invites us to believe that prior to packing for Europe, Asia, or North America we must disinvest in what our lives can offer and provide. Our lives are stripped of their lustre as the routinisation of life becomes synonymous with boredom. But whatever happened to courtship and recognising in routine a loyal lover who proffers stability, serenity, and home upon restless hearts? The misdiagnosis of familiarity as signifying a lack in different domains of our lives creates shadows that stalk and haunt and wail like banshees dreaming of a siren’s song. ‘Boredom’ need not be understood as anything other than the onset of deep-seated familiarity with one’s environment, a familiarity that invites ever more modes of encountering that which has previously been encountered, including ourselves. The story misinforms us that we cannot possibly find satisfaction in inhabiting one place for protracted periods, including our bodies and the ways in which they perceive and understand the world. Beauty does not lurk here, the story whispers. And so we resign ourselves to disaffection with the contours of the lives we lead, bags in tow on board the next flight to another city and/or country. That we confuse familiarity with boredom reveals the limits of our collective imagination and the impoverished ways in which we relate to the environments we inhabit and the interpersonal relationships that animate them. Stark is the night and poor is the heart that can nary find rest in the mundanity and seeming banality of the familiar, for it is here that our lives are lived. It is here that we serenade the moon which is too often eclipsed by the sun. Here, our dreams are realised like the touch of warm feet under the duvet during cold winter nights. This is what we mask, dillydallying to the sound of hubristic promises about what the horizon holds. Ding, ding, ding as dawn swiftly turns into dusk, consuming day and night like unworthy irritants, tricksters that seduce one into a never-ending dalliance with life. Ding, ding, ding, the end never ends.

This is the story: that our hearts and minds must always be restless until they find temporary respite in the promise of another horizon. Still, the replacement of one seemingly dissatisfying horizon for another more satisfying one merely serves as a bandage for one’s inability to wholeheartedly welcome and socialise that which is familiar into one’s life. It provides the appearance that life would be stagnant or marked by failure if one integrated an appreciation of familiarity into one’s understanding of the so-called ‘good’ life. Yet, the high octave experiences of new places, relationships, foods, jobs and achievements, status and many-varied experiences that come and go like the rising and setting of the sun, are not the places we should seek beauty. For this is the story, that beauty truly lurks in the unfamiliar shock to the senses of experiencing a place or individual for the first time or sparingly so as to retain their allure. The story is a snake lying in wake beneath unmade sheets and serenading us to crawl into bed like dutiful lovers. It blinds us to the ways in which boredom is awareness of and an invitation to embrace the familiar and, consequently, find beauty in what is typically dismissed as mundane, including our relationships to ourselves. It is a siren ring-ring-ringing to entice us into the bosom of a story whose teeth are sunk deep inside our flesh, unwilling to let go because we have all become the storytellers. We host vigils and feasts to weave elaborate yarns and whisper the story to generations young and old. It is well-rehearsed. The clock chimes and the winter rain pours, rattling doors and shaking trees. Still, stories live and die, just like their tellers. Stubborn as a newborn clinging to its mother’s bosom, suckling and clinging to dear life, inducted into our shortsighted ways of being. We tire of stories that carry empty promises and their stillborn hopes. Fading, always fading, into the periphery.

***

I sit, stand, and walk along the footpath, tarmac, or concrete sidewalk. Struck by the surreality of the synchronicity with which life is ordered, I pause to digest the serenity of being alive, breathing, strolling, kicking, sleeping, waking, eating, pissing, shitting, loving and being loved. I stare at advertisements designed to be alluring to passersby. It is a McDonalds’ advert that claims to possess the solution to the existential dread that many people experience. It reads, “Existing? You deserve a little treat.” The beauty does not lie in the assumption that a McCafé will resolve whatever difficulties someone might be navigating, but in the absurdity of peddling and promoting consumption as the ever-present antidote for life’s woes. The advertisement naturalised and normalised the despair that many people experience and offered (for a price) a McDonald’s beverage as a companion that will alleviate any wound. Such advertisements and the absurd manner in which they punctuate built urban environments are laughably enjoyable to parse. Their effectiveness on the other hand, can be quite sobering and saddening as we are indoctrinated into viewing all aspects of life as commodities that can be purchased at varying prices to soothe our woes. Travel is as much a commodity as a Maccas meal, albeit the cost differs. Ordinarily, we traverse much more than physical geographies but psychic and emotional terrains. We circumnavigate the contours of whole continents, the bodies they house, and the minds they ensnare. We fancy that flights to geographies yet uncharted will heal us from the drudgery of the familiar and its undying sonnets.

I see the upturned lips as I stand and walk along the streets of Perth, noticing small details on the pedestrian path, cracks and stains and cigarette butts, perhaps some errant phlegm smeared on the path. I wonder about my observations and smile. There is a certain degree of character that these fluids and objects add to the sidewalk. The stains on the mid- and high-rise buildings that litter the landscape reveal silent stories of lives that have touched and been touched by the buzzing activity animating the streets. Closer reflection might reveal a painting of sorts; dirt etched on the surface of seemingly unseemly buildings. Towels and clothes flung over balconies to dry. Glass broken on the sidewalk, perhaps in a fit of excessive excitability and the feeling that one is invincible. Each day, I wonder about what has or has not changed about the cityscapes I traverse, being quite deliberate about noticing and observing movements in my environment. For it is true that nothing is as it was yesterday. Small details shift, change littered and peppered throughout the undulating skyline of the city. Here and there lies a tree and a park with expansive green grass threatening to become brown as winter rain refuses to fall. Leaves fall from the branches that prop them up as new landscapes dawn as picturesque as the eye that beholds them. Those who travel or have been a tourist know something of this. They are always so very interested in the ‘new’ environments they find themselves in. They cannot refrain from making observations, finding something fascinating, remarkable, astonishing and astounding, lacking yet notable, and all manner of things. They regale at the cracks in sidewalks. The same blue or grey sky they can find at home. They are taken in by the different shapes and sizes of buildings new and old. New babes enamoured by the promise that novelty holds. Dancing, as it were, to someone else’s picture of the mundane.

Still, the tourist is fundamentally interested, whether in appearances and well-curated experiences or what is peddled as authentic, or yet other attributes of the environments they visit. Their interests take them far and wide, and the promise of better innings is enough to seduce. Shunning what is known for the unknown, the tourist finds enjoyment in being a stranger to one’s surroundings. She embraces alienation under the guise of celebrating life and becoming ever more familiar and intimate with herself. Sometimes, she acknowledges that her forays to other geographies are an escapist wet dream designed to therapeutically offer a sense of catharsis that cannot be found in her original environment. The tourist looks nothing like the migrant seeing as she has little desire to make a home out of the unfamiliar. That is, she is not interested in familiarising what underpins her search for novelty. The migrant on the other hand is pulled by the promise of greener pastures and the desire to familiarise or domesticate the unfamiliar, that is, to build a home and become attuned to the mundane rhythms of a place. While the tourist shuns familiarity, the migrant craves and pines after it, even while grieving the distance that is created between his new home and his country of origin. With either the tourist or the migrant, new geographies are commodities, but especially in the mind of the tourist. The migrant personalises his new home and humanises it, whereas the tourist objectifies the environments she briefly escapes into, temporary salves for deep-seated wounds. Here, new geographies as commodities are, for the tourist, akin to the McCafé that is peddled as medicine for individual and collective woes. A dime trickles down to spiritual troubles clothed in economic robes. This is how the siren sounds.

I remember that story of old, ever so prescient that it is deeply impressed upon the minds of today’s children and elderly alike. I remember being a child running around the same yard, climbing the same old trees, eating the same fruits, digging the same dirt, falling on the same grass, agitating the same bees and wasps, and all else that was never simply the same. I recall the ring-ring-ring of the pebbles which peppered the driveway, the familiar voice and gait of my father, and my childish arms wide open and ready for his embrace. How many times did I play with the same toys, books, sticks and trees which were always never the same? How many times did I fall onto the same ground which was never the same as it had always been? How many times did I listen for and hear the voice of my mother and relatives, which were always never the same? Still, each of these things retained a degree of constancy which made them recognisable and familiar and comforting. Always simultaneously becoming something other than they are while seemingly remaining unchanged. This dance, of becoming and unbecoming, is one that I know too well and within it lies the salve to the tourist’s woes. For a tourist is never simply a tourist while abroad and gallivanting in foreign geographies. One can be a tourist in one’s life. Moving, always moving like a stranger who cannot colour in the contours of one’s restless heart and mind. Yet to recognise that what is familiar need not be understood as boring or imprisoning is to open one’s eyes and ears to the everchanging nature of one’s environment and the simultaneous process of becoming and unbecoming. Here, there are whirlpools of novelty to excavate though they may require deliberate observation that can capture even the most imperceptible of change while cherishing what is constant. Here, then, we part with the old story, dancing on the precipice of the past dwelling as it does, in the present, and praying at the altar of futures known and unknown. Therein lies the beauty. Therein lies the story of tomorrow. Suckling, always suckling, on the tip of my tongue.

***

This is the story. A simple notion. To recognise ourselves, others, and our environments as singularly malleable things that are subject to ongoing change. Through change, becoming. Through becoming, unravelling. Always already in motion. Familiar yet unfamiliar. Still, capable of holding our interest. Being embraced and embracing. Recognising that relationships flourish when all parties to the relationship are attentive. So it is with us and the environments we inhabit. Excavating the depths of who we understand ourselves to be, both individually and relationally, allows us to excavate the depths of our environs. Many run, run, run from the implications of this story. Denying, always denying the possibility of a non-dismissive relationship to what is familiar. Blinded, terribly blinded by the presumption that fleeing from oneself and one’s circumstances will be nourishing. Quenching thirsts one did not know existed. Finding nothing but what is familiar everywhere one turns. Bored. Here, there are only disruptions to the high-octave novelty we too often seek. The things we are taught to value: whimsy, adventure, spontaneity. These too are clothed in the familiar. A stray piece of hair that sparks a game of hide and seek. A smelly sock that precipitates a friendly wrestling match with a loved one. A sprinkling of water that ignites competition to determine who can wet another more efficiently. These are all instances of whimsy and exploratory fun and play. They need not be punctuated by deathly leaps off of a cliff’s edge. The merriment they usher is much more enduring than what is too often sold as markers of exciting lives. This is the story, of seeing and recognising ourselves and the environments we inhabit. Cherishing, as it were, the chewing gum on the tarmac. Wondering, always wondering, how the hell did that get there? How, one opines, did we get here?