TwoCents | In Praise of the Every Day

In the late 1950s, a Dutch Artist called Johannes Vermeer created a painting called “The Little Street”. This painting though worth discussion features nothing remarkable at all. If you look closely you can see a woman in a doorway of a house on that street of delft, sewing; a couple of children were at their games on the floor adjacent to that same building; you can make out a woman in a white scarf, red patchy blouse tucked in a blue patchy skirt, in the yard getting some work done and these little slices of the delft life are contrasted by a four-story building of all brick and chimney and glass. In the background, you can make out the red mountains that blend in with the building and the sky is pregnant with the promise of rain despite its bright colour. I have chosen to highlight this painting because, at the time, it was notably out of the ordinary. The paintings of merit in that age were mainly those depicting the aristocrats and people of worthy feats of military excellence - The extraordinary. This defiance reminds me of the magic that exists in those very forgettable parts of the days we currently lead. The little street makes me smile because nothing is more relatable than the daily traffic of day-to-day - nothing as universal as the mundane. Last month I quit my job to pursue other interests for the time. Four days before my last day I booked a ride with my colleague home so I could split the cab fare and carry all my stuff home. We were nearly at my house when I saw one of those Gated estates I see shut so often, ajar. The gates were wide open and a school bus was turning in slowly, Children plastered to the windows in varying degrees of boredom, excitement or disinterest. I stared out the Lagride and this forgettable moment catapulted me into a moment of clarity. “in a few days my every day for the past two years will be no more. Once, like those children that were my every day and now it is no more.” For the last two years at my job, I had gotten up mindless after the first months; I dressed after reluctantly washing myself in the morning’s cold. I hopped in my father’s car or walked some 15 minutes to get a bus to the office before the daylight could break. Fifty Naira became a hundred and then a hundred and Fifty was required to get to the office. I walked by a gated house in particular where two dogs not dulled by their old age barked loudly at me till they both got put down after my first year doing this. I went into the Daytona supermarket hundreds of times and bought or thought to buy before making it to my desk five minutes away. Some days it was a relief to make it to my faulty chair, sometimes I just made it to the couch of the office for the rest of my sleep but for the past two years, these standard days were the company I had. If I haven’t lost you, all this flashed before my eyes as I saw those children and remembered myself in and out of those high-fenced estates on the school bus and I think it’s because we tend to recount the mundane only at the times they are forever changing. Maybe Johannes Vermeer didn’t want to wait till he was called away from the town delft to smile on his simple street knowingly. “ this remarkable ordinary home of mine that I ran past even as these children”, I imagine he might have thought as he finished that painting. I think the mundane requires more attention from us. Not only at the points we shift from one big moment to the next. Look around your home and the static chairs and tables and take in the smell of the air of your street. See your journey to and fro the office differently because the mundane is likely all we have in between those big moments that might never come. Even when they arrive, those graduations, resignations, deliveries, beginnings and ends; even they soon become the ordinary everyday.

Other insights from Joshua Omoijiade