During the two-plus years since I started this blog, I’ve normally posted a new entry every ten days or so. However, it’s been almost a month since my last one, the result of my struggling with what felt like “writer’s block,” a truly new experience for me. So, I’ve been scratching my head and trying to generate some potentially fruitful ideas.

The season of the year is sometimes a “trigger,” but I seemed “stuck in the middle”—too late for Halloween (whatever blog that might inspire!) and too early for Thanksgiving or Advent. And, of course, there’s the ever-present pandemic that has had us frozen in place for months in another in-between—the remembrance of “normal times” on the one hand, and the hope for a return to things as they were on the other. Which is to say nothing about the election, which has had us itching under a cloud of anxiety, stalled between voting and now the conclusive results with all of the demands they bring.

Then as all of that bounced around in my head, like bumper cars at a carnival, I heard that internal voice saying, “Wake up, Dumbo, your subject is staring you in the face!” And so it was.

As you’ve probably guessed, it’s simply this: while all of us need and enjoy those experiences that lift us above the ordinary—a holiday, a birthday, an anniversary, a vacation trip, an election victory(!)—all such ascents to a mountaintop are inevitably followed by a necessary descent into the valley of the commonplace—what I’m calling the “wilderness of the in-between”—where most of our lives are spent.

Some people have a lot of trouble accepting this common and pervasive fact of human experience. They don’t want to adjust themselves to it and as a result, live unhappy lives while always looking for those times when they can relish the thrill of the next stimulating moment.  

As I thought about that. I was reminded of a song I’d heard recently— written and composed, I discovered, by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in the 1960s that became a hit for Peggy Lee—entitled appropriately, “Is That All There Is?” The verses—spoken by Lee (and, as I learned later,  taken directly from an 1896 story titled fittingly, “Disillusionment”)—describe several scenes: a child watching a house fire, a twelve-year old’s visit to a circus, watching a lover who goes away, and the anticipation of her last breath; the same chorus is sung following each verse:

Is that all there is? Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing;
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball,
If that’s all there is.

That plaintive cry, masquerading as a call to “party time,” must have struck a chord with generations of listeners, since after Lee’s release in 1969 it’s been recorded multiple times by several other artists—the last one, by Cristina, as recently as last year.

If it is true, as I suspect it is, that many people live under the shadow of the question, “is that all there is?” perhaps it’s no wonder that even in the horror and haunting intransience of this pandemic—along with the scary and daunting challenges of the election that’s finally been resolved but has been hanging over our heads—we continue to live unrelentingly in a time when the commercial sector hawks everything as “special” and “must have,” and “new and improved” (what I have come to call “the great American lie”) so that we are somehow almost comically led to expect that we should sizzle and effervesce—keep on dancing and break out the booze—all the time.

That said, all of us—those who don’t play the “dance-and-booze” game and even those who do—will, of course, experience from time to time truly authentic peak days, and I’m not demeaning them: a time when you are gratified by having  accomplished  a task that you set for yourself; or the culmination of a period of expectation or achievement for a family member or a friend—a graduation or an engagement or the birth of a child—that filled you with joy and with pride. But such days of high excitement when your feet are walking on air are generally followed by sludging along through the muddy roads of dealing with the “this and that,” when the threat of being overcome by the dreary humdrum of that “wilderness of the in-between” all but smothers you with its promise that tomorrow will be the same.

Those days of the inevitable letdown are the difficult and dangerous ones for all of us. We can usually manage a crisis, even when we surprise ourselves  and wonder later how we did it.  When you or a loved one or a friend has a serious health issue—a heart attack, a stroke, the spectre of cancer or some other threatening diagnosis—or we are overwhelmed with grief when faced with the loss of someone close to us, then from somewhere in the unexpected recesses of our souls and the faithful, dependable support of friends, we are amazed at the endurance that carries us through to the other side of what seemed a “wall too high.”

As the late Edmund Steimle reminded us, a person, even one who might be considered “ordinary,” can become heroic in a crisis. We are all accustomed to the frequent accounts of such instances—almost every day the news media carry the familiar stories of astounding bravery. A child is lost in the woods, or someone is trapped in an automobile accident, or a climber has disappeared in the mountains, and some unsuspecting soul finds a hero hidden inside and rises to an exceptional act of courage.

Days of crisis are often not the most dangerous days for most of us. The threat lurks in those in-between days “when monotony and the commonplace stretch and yawn from dawn ‘til dusk—like forty days in the wilderness”—days when there is no excitement and nothing exceptional is demanded of us.

And as we look wearily at this seemingly endless, tedious, and dreary wilderness of ordinary days, this life of dirty dishes and crying children, or being up to our necks in accounts payable and dealing with difficult people across a counter or a desk or in a classroom, we may be tempted to wonder whether this is the life we were born for. Some can’t come to terms with it and try to break away, running from one artificial high to another, trying to leap-frog the ordinary days–like a flat stone skipping across a pond—striving to escape the wilderness of the in-between. But it won’t work. 

It’s inevitable that we will confront this reality and be tempted to try to avoid it and the answer, in my humble judgment, is two-fold.  Note that there is a difference, on the one hand, between seeking the “leap to the mountaintop” as escapism and, on the other hand, “climbing the mountain” in search of a respected and helpful purpose to which we can devote ourselves.

First, and most pervasive, is to avoid the distant and often disappointing lure of some breakout from the dull valley of the commonplace, but rather to direct our hands and our feet toward the tasks of the “day in and day out,” even when they feel like inappropriate obstacles to what we should be free to accomplish. It isn’t necessarily easy to stick to the mundane tasks, and the challenge can be especially intimidating if we have to spend much of our time doing them alone.

There is nothing wrong with solitude, of course, as long as we have learned to value it and distinguish it from loneliness, but we also need and can profit from a connection to a community. It could be a community you already know about, or one for which you search, or perhaps even a community of likeminded inhabitants of their own stretch of ordinary days. But whatever it is and wherever you find it, an awareness of belonging to a community provides, as Nicholas Kristof asserts, “that web of relationships, beliefs, trust, decency and sense of identity” that helps hold us together when spending these wilderness days alone threatens to tear us apart.

As I learned from Parker Palmer long ago, our equal and opposite needs for both solitude and community constitute a significant paradox.  Without community, solitude degenerates from rich inwardness to loneliness and isolation; but community without solitude is reduced from a rich fabric of relationships into a mere “buzzing” crowd. In other words, we need both, if not in an equal, at least in a balanced, rapport.

Second, equally, or perhaps more, important, is to know the difference between viewing those long days of our lives as simply groveling along in life’s lowlands, and, conversely, seeing them as the common but secure foundation of a life devoted to a high purpose in which we believe—perhaps have been “called”—which values our gifts, and to which we devote ourselves. 

I would harken back to the distinction I have made several times in previous posts—and to which I owe my friend, Bob Knott—between “a job” and the “the work of one’s life.” A job is an instrument for providing sufficient material means for one’s work; one’s work, on the other hand, encompasses one’s job but is the broader task of doing one’s life well as a human being. My point is that once we strike hands with a lofty purpose, whatever it is, then we can perceive the days of the in-between as less of a wilderness and more like the pillars that support the purposeful life we have chosen.

At the same time, it is only fair to recognize that the risks of compromise and disillusionment always lurk in the shadows. When our efforts to fulfill the committed life we have chosen—whatever it may be—are rewarded with resentment and criticism, or the attempted kindnesses and services we have offered have been ignored or scorned, we feel the pain of rejection, of wasted effort, and can begin to wonder whether it’s worth it. 

Can I say that, in the long run, it doesn’t depend primarily on how we feel?  As Steimle put it, if a purposeful life were dependent on how we feel, it would be full to the brim one moment and empty the next, and it would be empty precisely when we need it most! I agree, and would argue that It matters less how we feel, or what other people think about us, than what we think about ourselves and about the life and the values to which we have given ourselves.

Happily, not all of our time is spent in the valley of the commonplace, and that, in conclusion, is the other side of this truth. There will from time to time still be glowing days on a mountaintop and the reflection of their radiance will enable even the days in the wilderness of the in-between to have the shimmering light of “holy” purpose upon them, too.

May it be so for you . . . . and for me.

With appreciation to Nicholas Kristoff (NYTimes op ed, Oct. 30, 2020), Parker Palmer, Bob Knott, and—with less specific recall, but equal gratitude, for inspiration from years past—to the late John Claypool, Joachim Jeremias, and especially Edmund Steimle, whose sermon, “The Peril of Ordinary Days,” based on the gospel account of Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness, I heard when it was broadcast on The Protestant Hour when I was in college in 1955—I took some notes, and it obviously “stuck.”  It was published in 1957 in a collection of his sermons, which I don’t have, entitled, Are You Looking for God? and is archived at day1.org/protestant-hour.