"How was your day", I messaged her.
"Boring and uneventful...how was your day been so far", she replied.
"Boring and uneventful...how was your day been so far", she replied.
Again? This was becoming a recurring and somewhat worrying theme whereby I would go onto discuss in length the events that broke the monotony of adult life and added some color to it while she patiently listened. In some ways it was ideal. I had a hundred things to say while she was more than content to listen and (more importantly) laugh at it. It was not everyday I had someone who displayed that level of curiosity in my awesome life (warning..narcissism ahead).
However as much as I do love talking about myself, what I appreciated as much were people who were equally and more expressive. A common trend that was emerging of late was this lack of expressiveness and openness, something I blamed largely on the distracting nature of smartphones, social media, Netflix etc, which resulted in terrible table conversations and way too many moments of silences. It was not that things were not happening to us on a daily basis, things that surprised, angered, disappointed or simply made us happy, but we were either failing to observe these events or failing to appreciate that they were all there was to life.
For as Annie Dillard, in trying to emphasis presence over productivity, brilliant put it, "How we spend our days is how we spend our lives".
So yes, do not tell me the day was uneventful. If you look back carefully, every day had something that caused your heart to flutter, every day had thoughts that made your emotions stir and every day had something you could talk about.
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