On Being Ordinary

He tells me, usually early and usually as a warning, that there is nothing very interesting about him. He works. He has a house. Nothing happened to him. He says it the way a man discloses a defect before the other party can discover it, and he is bracing for me to lose interest.

I want to say plainly that this has never once been a problem, and that the men who arrive convinced they are remarkable are far harder work.

What he means by ordinary is that his history contains no incident that would explain him. He has looked for a cause, found nothing dramatic, and concluded that his wanting must therefore be unearned. This is a very common piece of reasoning and it is wrong at the first step. The wanting does not require a justification. It is not compensation for an event. It has simply been there, quietly, for as long as he can remember, and the absence of a story is not evidence against it.

He has also misunderstood what I am for. He imagines, I think, that I am collecting unusual material, and that his task is to be sufficiently strange to hold my attention. So he arrives with the interesting parts arranged at the front, and they are almost always the least useful thing he brings me.

What I actually work with is ordinary to the point of dullness when written down. What time he wakes. What he does with the hour before we speak. Which small thing he did not do this week, and how he explained that to himself. The texture of a life is not made of incidents, and neither is any arrangement worth having.

There is a particular relief that arrives when he understands this, and it usually takes a few weeks. He stops performing the edited version. The conversation gets slower and considerably more honest. He is no longer auditioning, which frees up an enormous amount of attention he had been spending on it without knowing.

The men who worry about being ordinary are, in my experience, the ones who last. They pay attention. They do what they said they would. They notice when something changes. The remarkable ones are frequently exhausting and rarely present, because a man who needs the arrangement to be extraordinary will leave the moment it becomes routine, and everything real about this is routine.

So he can keep the warning if he likes. I have heard it many times and it has never once been the useful part of a first conversation. The useful part comes later, when he stops apologising for the shape of his life and starts telling me what is actually in it.