Finding The Beauty In Ordinary Things

In Defense of The Mundane

I have lived with my sister and her baby for about a month now. It has thankfully opened me to wonder at the non-functional value of growth. I now see what parents see — more like feel — when the child begins to do things on its own. Things like rolling on its side, sitting up straight, putting an effort to sit up straight from a lying position; oh, that beautiful struggle. And I may just, with my imaginative eye, have seen into the future why parents cry when their babies go to elementary school, go to boarding school, go to university, get married, and best of all, have their own babies. All these, I have learnt in just a month.

I made a mistake initially to think that parents celebrated the growth of their children simply for the sake of functional values. Such as the relief that the child can now join to do chores in the house and whatnot. I thought parents were simply happy that their children could speak now, move by themselves; that this eases their burdens. No doubt this is part of the package. No parent wants it to be the case years later that their child still cannot speak, be mobile or help around. Still, this does not imply that this is the whole package. There is something else; something less tractable and definable that parents exude when their babies become more human. They cannot tell you what it is. But they will show you. They will call you to see the baby waving; to see the baby trying hard to roll over; to hear the baby’s unintelligent mumbling; to see the child walking. Away from the measurable benefits of growth, parents delight in the growth itself.

When my niece — my sister’s baby — makes a sound we all find unintelligible, my sister tries to see if she can find some intelligibility in it. She sets down an ear to try to find something. My dad — the child’s grandfather — does the same thing too. I don’t assume that they are sure that they will find anything. But I am certain that they are always happy to set down that ear; they are willing to go on a hunt even when they are certain that it will yield no treasure. Every action is scrutinized carefully and joyfully not in the least because we will find. But because we believe something we have found: that this baby is alive and undisputably human; that as a human it has the potential for growth; that growth is expected;  and that growth is beautiful to behold. We believe in the baby’s intrinsic value. And I think, we believe in the intrinsic value of people.

However, it seems to me as if we do not live up to the belief that humans have intrinsic value. Perhaps we believe that human beings are intrinsically valuable. Yet, we seem only to speak and act as though they are not. How? We, when asked, justify the value of human beings by turning to functional terms and instrumental language. We say of men that they are valuable if they can protect and provide. Women are valuable to the extent that they are desirable and supposedly fertile. And children? They are liabilities until they can prove otherwise. And there are those of us who see babies as nothing but burdens.

I do not claim that caring for children is stress-free. They do bring a type of burden. But that is only because they cannot help themselves. It is a welcome burden, and a burden we should not be eager to rid ourselves of. If we are so eager to remove the burden of childcare, we will extend the same attitude to every necessary burden in this world — we will cease being helpful to fellow men who can in no way offer immediate recompense. Ultimately, we will lose our boast of being a loving species. It is as if without burdens, we will cease to learn how to love. We learn to love by carrying the burdens of those who cannot immediately turn around and carry our burdens as well. To reduce all burden-bearing to a transaction is to lose our authority on love and designate our entire humanity as a commercial venture. I am sure no one wishes, even if they profess otherwise and call themselves “realistic,” to live in such a world.

Growth’s appeal, removed from every utilitarian, calculated, metricizable, transactional framing, rests in the process rather than in the results. This, I think, neatly explains the booming “plant mom” genre. You may justify why someone may keep a pot plant in the house on the basis of what plants do biologically and their ecological benefits. You may downplay a diligent gardener’s obsession with their flowers in the name of “science,” claiming that this or that is good for the climate, for the air, for the environment and whatever myriads of benefits we may pull from Horticulture journals. But if you refuse to speak to the gardener and intimate yourself with their obsession, you will have successfully accepted the merely incidental for the intentional. You would have missed that the plant owner delights in the growth of her plant every step of the way, without paying a moment’s attention to how the oxygen in the room gets finer by the day. The transactional frame of mind (which reduces all human endeavours to utilitarian metrics) substitutes — and this is a common mistake — the salient incidental for the silently intentional. It mistakes a powerful unintended outcome for a subtle but intended purpose. Nonetheless, I think caring for plants is inferior to caring for children when done as an existential substitute for caring for children. The latter bears more risk than the former and that says a lot.

When a mother thinks her child’s gibberish is something other than what we all hear, she is not crazy. She is simply being a parent. In fact I, no, we, should be appalled when we see a parent who is nonchalant about their infant’s growth efforts. We should be wary of the parent who has no delight in the rather mundane struggles which the child makes to convince us that it wants to be an active part of the world. Speaking of being an active part of the world, the first time I held my niece to my chest, I told my sister “She moves! She is moving!” with so much delight. My sister replied “Yes of course. Yes, she moves. She is a human being, not a doll.” What a statement! The imitative infant, fueled possibly by experience, instinct, and imagination does not want to remain helpless. Every parent must revel in that. Everyone should revel in that.

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