“Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary,” philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote. How do we make sense of this striking assertion? It seems to contradict common sense. Aren’t the greatest minds concerned with the greatest events, theories, ideas, and visions, not the insignificant details of daily life?
Pascal’s surprising statement deserves a closer examination, a teasing apart in order to discover the wisdom within.
Great minds understand the importance of the ordinary. After all, much of life consists of the ordinary. Rescuing someone who has fallen on a subway track, discovering a new cure for a disease, or completing an artistic masterpiece—these events are few and far between. Memorable as they may be, to discard mundane moments as unimportant would be a great mistake and lead us to believe that the bulk of our lives is meaningless.
The people who hunger for adventures and moments of glory will likely live dissatisfied lives. Their experience will consist of many flat, gray, empty days punctuated by a few moments of euphoria.
A Thought Experiment
Does that seem too good to be true? Consider this: A man wakes up in a beautiful garden. He doesn’t know how he got there, or why. He finds himself surrounded by marvels: giant plants, strange creatures that can fly and sing, a river made of liquid glass that you can drink, and mysterious lights in the sky.More surprisingly, he discovers other people who have also woken up in the garden with no memory of the past, companions he can confide in and whose company he can enjoy. None of them are quite sure of the purpose of the strange garden (which seems to be immense) or their own presence in it. They start by trying to understand the true nature of the place they find themselves in and what the meaning of it all is.
That would be a fascinating adventure.
But it’s more than just a story. Each one of us is that man who wakes up in the unfamiliar garden. The garden is the world; the other wayfarers in the garden are the rest of the human race. In other words, life itself, taken as a whole, is the greatest adventure anyone could conceive of.
If it didn’t exist as it is, who could have imagined a world like this? We take the world and everything in it (including ourselves) for granted. But we have forgotten how strange and wonderful and impossible our very presence here is. To put it another way, is any of this really “ordinary”?
On the Treadmill of Daily Life
The first way to understand Pascal is to blink away the mists of familiarity that blind us to the beautiful strangeness of our situation. We don’t want to be like Antonio and Sebastian in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” They find themselves on a magical island, but treat it with total indifference.They are unlike the older and wiser Gonzalo, who cries: “Beseech you, sir, be merry; you have cause/ So have we all, of joy; for our escape/ Is much beyond our loss.”
Gonzalo notices the wonderful elements of the island that the others think nothing of, such as its greenery or the miraculous drying of the castaways’ clothing: “Here is everything advantageous to life. ... How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green! ... But the rarity of it. ... That our garments, being, as they were,/ drenched in the sea, hold notwithstanding their/ freshness and glosses.”
Antonio and Sebastian’s only thought, on the other hand, is how to gain more power for themselves through murder and treachery. It’s as though scales have come down over their eyes, preventing them from appreciating the gift of life and the gift of the world.
There’s another, more practical way to approach Pascal’s quotation. In the treadmill of daily life, it’s important to not despise the little things. Like the atoms that form a molecule and the molecules that form a living thing, small daily activities and events amount to immense and magnificent things.
In the day to day, when a mother or father changes diapers, reads stories, or calms tantrums, he or she may not feel that any one of these actions taken singly amounts to much of an adventure. But when the old man and old woman look with pride at their grown children and think back over all the years of those little daily actions, they realize that, all the time, they were engaged in the adventure of raising a human being.
Adventures Under Our Noses
Oftentimes, a slight shift of perspective unfolds realms of meaning that lay dormant in seemingly ordinary circumstances. Any difficulty, for example, can be viewed as an opportunity to grow, learn, and discover. As G. K. Chesterton wrote: “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” Losing one’s keys can transform from a nuisance into a noble quest.“You do not need to fly to the other side of the planet to undertake an expedition,” he wrote. “Adventure is only a state of mind. I believe that adventure is about stretching yourself: mentally, physically or culturally.
“It is about doing what you do not normally do, pushing yourself hard and doing it to the best of your ability. If that is true then adventure is all around us, at all times. Adventure is accessible to normal people, in normal places, in short segments of time and without having to spend much money.”
Examples of microadventures include camping in your backyard, swimming in a river, hiking at night, or geocaching.
Life’s broader contours can take on deeper meaning when we recognize the less tangible types of quests, adventures, and journeys that permeate the “everyday” world. There are spells, such as the magic of music or the stillness of a softly settling evening. And there are quests, such as looking after our families, loving our neighbors, or excelling at work.
There is so much to do, and endless possibilities ahead of us. To repeat Humphreys, “Adventure is only a state of mind.”
