FUTURE SHOCK

It’s an ordinary day. We had to wait 1,000 years for an extraordinary one like yesterday. True, today is special: the Lord’s Day for Christians; St. Basil’s Day for Greek Orthodox; Fiesta Bowl Day for left-over football fans; Broken Resolutions Day for persons hung over. But by Monday, it’s back to everyday clothes and everyday words for everyday tasks. What do we do with the regular comedowns we describe as “everyday”?

Back in the 20th century, near its end, pundits taught the public to think in terms of millenniums. Today, the morning after “the morning after,” we have to relearn thinking in terms of days, to celebrate everyday, ordinary time.

Thinking in terms of millenniums meant we historians were pressed into being momentarily relevant: Name the 10 greatest people, the 10 greatest inventions, the 10 greatest events. Only extraordinary times seemed important. What happened to everyday?

Thinking in terms of thousands of years meant futurists were pressed into predicting outcomes in distant futures. Forget the fact that almost everything of importance that happens comes in the form of surprises on ordinary days to such prophets.

Not that nothing of value issues from thought about time in grand terms. We gain perspective from review of the past. We increase our imaginations envisioning a variety of futures. But a moratorium now on such ventures permits a clearing of the mind, allowing it to face what counts: day-by-day existence.

Think of “ordinary time.” Catholics lend us that term. It’s their name for the midwinter and midsummer stretches of the church year unmarked by major holidays. “Ordinary” here does not mean the opposite of “extraordinary,” because extraordinary things can happen any day. Instead, it refers to a notion that translates to other faiths and non-faiths: finding time every day for “ordered,” purposeful living.

The counsel to take life a day at a time sounds banal and, yes, ordinary, if it is attached to nothing else. We attach it here to the experience of being set free from overdone millennial thinking. But there is a second connection. This is the season for individuals, groups and societies to make and then keep or break resolutions. When they almost instantly break their long-term resolves, the temptation becomes strong to forget them entirely. But realizing the value of ordinary time lets everyone treat each morning as newly rich in promise.

The insight behind such an approach is simple and, again, ordinary. We have recently looked back on peak moments of a century in terms of epochal days: Armistice Day at the end of a war, a Day of Infamy at the beginning of one and the Longest Day in the midst of one. But each of these occurs against the background of thousands of days-at-a-time, when leaders made decisions, bad or good, and millions of ordinary people received commands or promises to be kept or broken.

Public consequences result from the idea of taking each ordinary day as special. For example: Two words that marked the turn of the millennium and shadow or shine on this new day are “globalization” and the “market.” Advances in technology and changes in the organization of commerce are altering all lives. Critics point out that we lack a social philosophy to go with the new world scene. Should we be looking for a new “ism”?

Given the bad record of isms in the century past, that’s doubtful. What kind of philosophy or political theory could provide it? Can religion? People of good will are working every day to reduce the killing many do in the name of their philosophies and their gods. Many try to induce those of each faith to respect and work for justice and peace with others. But there are no signs that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and more are ready to converge to generate one philosophy and yield it power. Nor could they, without losing the distinctions that are the saving and motivating power for adherents.

Secular ideologies, given their 20th-century record, are in more disarray. Many led to the killing of millions of bodies and the devastation of billions of souls. There is promise still, of course, in efforts to enhance the liberating elements of some outlooks--democracy, republicanism--and put them to work in the step-by-step and day-by-day patterns of “ordinary time.”

Doing so can contribute to the life of individuals, when these elements get worked out. But life in the new market world, for all the material benefits it brings, has a downside. Widely noted are signs of workaholism, compulsive striving and dehumanizing competition. These need addressing in everyday terms.

Psalm 106 in the King James Bible speaks to the cultural scene. The writer recalled how God’s people, now free and prosperous, still complained and were wayward “in the wilderness.” So? God “gave them their request but sent leanness into their soul.” New translations call this a “wasting” disease or sickness. One need not believe in God or that God gave us our problems to see evidences of such today.

I do not mean that we are all in the wilderness, in Robert Bork’s grumpily titled “Slouching Towards Gomorrah.” We properly can celebrate diplomats who negotiate for peace a day at a time. Domestically, we could spend time every day recognizing the “good kids” and “good families” and “good companies,” instead of saving front pages and prime time only for the bad.

The common feature in the lives of those who make a positive difference every day has to do with the way they live out their vocations, their calling, their response to conscience or neighbor, to God or agenda. Maybe a few got their sense of a call through some blinding bolt out of the blue. But the called are usually those who have learned to use ordinary time well. They find their vocation through what I call “billions of daily particulars,” everyday signals that call them to be responsible and also to enjoy living.

Day-at-a-time living out of a calling, a vocation, has personal bearings. What is it that keeps us awake and conflicted? If we are haunted by guilt, yesterday preoccupies us. If we live by worry, it’s tomorrow that haunts. In the biblical understanding I was taught and sometimes put to work, divine forgiveness erases yesterday, and we are taught “to take no thought for the morrow.” That countercultural idea leaves us free for this ordinary day.

Sleep researchers say that bodies have a rhythm they call circadian. That nice adjective means “about a day” in length. It matches the basic measure of time. Primitives and peasants watched the sun rise and set. They marked days long before someone invented minutes and hours, weeks and months, numbered years and centuries. Back to basics: It’s even biblical to downplay millenniums under a God for whom “one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

Today is the day one might fall in love, have an accident, solve a problem, plan for (more than worry about) tomorrow, enjoy a game, toast a family’s fortunes, agonize in prayer over misfortune, visit someone terminally ill and learn what a day means to him or her, purge the mind of overdone millennial thinking, start over.

Instead of “happy new year” or “happy new millennium,” let’s think: “Have an extraordinary ordinary day,” invested with the meaning that a sense of a calling, a vocation, promotes to make everyday existence special.