ordinary is alright: Paterson
For most of my life I struggled with the near-crippling pressure of being the best or on top or perfect. It's the first time I'm properly talking about it as in putting it down in writing instead of blurting it out as a disorganized jumble of words only previously unlocked by (at the very least) mild intoxication. I want to discuss it through the lens of an amazing, heartfelt film called Paterson.
A bus driver writes poems. That's it. He has an artistically-inclined wife who loves him and is proud of his work. They have a dog. He drinks at the bar at night. There are people around town and they interact, in the bus, at the station, at the bar, and this bus driver listens. That's the whole of it. It's exceptionally ordinary. The dramatic arc is modest and it doesn't end in some huge cliffhanger or involves a shocking red herring. It's just this bus driver who writes poems, and the people he's surrounded with, and the town that he lives in.
The narrative structure is truly unconventional, yet it's beautiful because it's in the lack of fight scenes and huge conflicts that we really start paying attention to the little details of everyday life, from which we draw little fascinations and quiet musings, from which we derive art.
I feel like sometimes we come looking for drama in our lives. Although, I'm sure most of us have been thrust upon it. While it's true that anxiety is triggered by particular situations, anxiety also creates situations that don't really exist. It makes you think that you have to graduate with honors for your parents to be genuinely proud of you when in reality they really would appreciate you regardless. It makes you think that you have to be thin to wear a bikini otherwise people will constantly be judging you when in reality everyone's too preoccupied with their own affairs to actually care. It makes you think you're being awkward when in reality the person you're talking to couldn't really be bothered in the first place.
We always expect for something to go wrong in our lives that we've developed this subconscious warning sign in our brain to remind us of the inevitable, except it broke and now it just blinks wildly at every small situation like when we try to order coffee.
We always expect for our lives to have the conventional narrative structure with the huge dramatic arcs and addiction recovery stories and the stories they talk about in Christian magazines that we sometimes either directly or indirectly cause a lot of unnecessary drama to happen in our lives.
And it does happen sometimes. Things go to shit. But I hope we all get the chance to surf past that wave of anxiety to appreciate the mundane. Even when I'm in depressed moods, there's still at least one small aspect of life that was beautiful. Some beach or some book or some film or someone. When I found the time to extract myself from the many anxiety-triggers that I had, I developed almost an immediate fascination to things like the smell of my antibacterial soap, the way light reflects and scatters on water, the warmth of sunlight after having stepped out of an air-conditioned room. Mundane things. Ordinary. And yet beautiful somehow.
Paterson felt like watching that part of my life on film. Suddenly, every small thing is magical, and meaningful, and beautiful. I mean it definitely helps that Adam Driver is totally my type. But all things considered, we could all use a Paterson - something to show you that the everyday life that you probably hate to some degree has a multitude of redeemable qualities after all.
Throughout my childhood, I wanted to be the best so hard that I refused to play games I knew I'd be bad at, and refused to study subjects I knew I was bad at. I had a lot of dreams but I gave up on a lot of them because I always expected a huge hurdle that I couldn't possibly traverse with my current set of skills. I never thought myself to be an anxious person because that's usually a trait attributed to shy people (which I definitely was not), but I had for so long been limited by an insurmountable fear I didn't even know existed.
But as it turned out, most of the pressure in my life came from myself. As such it'll be hard to remove or undo, but my fascination of the mundane, and the art that I've created from them, have thus far been effective in reminding me that ordinary is alright. We don't have to be the best, really. We exist, and that's already good enough.
In an interview with Independent, the director Jim Jarmusch had said: "Some days, I drop the teacup, the window shade breaks…these goddamn objects! I get frustrated by them [...] Then I say, ‘accept it – accept that your house is full of broken things and you’re an idiot and your shirt’s on backwards!"
And on that note, I recommend you watch Paterson!
Til next Sunday,
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