the beauty in the mundane

I've made the conscious choice to allow certain addictions to persist over this past year. Some of them - like my insistence, when I have access to a car and am out of the city, on smoking a solitary, daily cigarette in a secluded spot of nature - are as self-destructive and dismissive of public health guidance as they are motivated by a desperate desire to not surrender all control, to not do everything by the book. Others, like my thoroughly obnoxious proclivity for posting dozens of tediously cropped photographs of the sky on social media each week, I simply can't help. But when it comes to compulsivity in my life, I'm dancing around the issue until I talk about Snapple.

It first started when I visited my grandmother in Santa Fe in December of 2019. I was no more than a week removed from the most intense professional experience of my life, a period of several weeks where I had participated in a project of genuine historic import and simultaneously, hideously, found that the toxicity of the experience had erased most of my interest in that line of work, a line of work that had been my dream since early youth. I arrived in New Mexico resentful and exhausted; the first night there, I slept fourteen hours. I awoke parched, and opening my grandmother's fridge, found myself face to face with what had to be America's largest collection (in private hands) of Diet Peach Snapple. I think I drank five the first day. By the time I left a couple weeks later, there must have been discussions high up in Snapple HQ about whether or not to rework supply chain logistics to respond to an unprecedented spike in Southwestern consumption.

The Snapple dependence waned until quarantine - the Trader Joe's I shop at in DC doesn't carry it and I'm too dependent on routine to alter my shopping habits, no matter how deliciously few calories Diet Snapple contains - but once I migrated home and had access to the Nirvana that was the Woodstock, NY Hannaford's beverage aisle, it came back in full force. By the fall, both my parents and my friends had staged interventions, to no success. "You have to drink water," they pleaded. The Yahoo Answers pages I introduced as evidence that Diet Peach Snapple possessed hydrating qualities did shockingly little to shake their shared conviction that I was steadily and intentionally eroding the inner lining of my organs. At my most Snapple-intensive point - which came in October of 2020, when I worked relentless 21 hour days on a voter protection project - I was drinking four before noon. Sleep, sex, exercise - everything else faded away into a hazy horizon. All there was was Snapple.

I don't let myself buy much Diet Snapple anymore. While it's mostly because I'm back to shopping at Trader Joe's, I know that some fraction of my reduction in consumption is because I would like to have children and watch them grow up to raise families of their own and you need a functional small intestine for that to be at all feasible. But a couple days ago, after my grandmothers got their second vaccinations, I flew to Santa Fe to surprise them and all of a sudden, found myself back in the belly of the reduced calorie beast.

This morning, the first thing to touch my lips was a Snapple. I finished it in two sips and then, bribing my little brother with the promise of a sip of his own, convinced him to get me another one. As I guzzled its golden nectar, Elliot picked up the cap and read the Snapple fact. Cackling, he called over to me. "Did you know that it's physically impossible for pigs to look at the sky?" he choked out, between seven-year-old chortles. The mental image was ridiculous. How could we not all laugh?

It was a beautiful moment, a fragile one. The kind of moment that has felt increasingly rare over the past twelve months as all of us - overwhelmed by CNN alerts, Instagram calls to action, fears about at-risk friends and family, and ever-growing feelings of stagnation and mediocrity - have retreated within. Maybe some have found this year especially conducive to growth and productivity; if that's you, congratulations and please don't talk to me about it. But I know so many of the rest of us have found ourselves alone in our bedrooms with doors shut, opening the same websites we just closed, feeling devoid of creativity and purpose. I think constantly about how the behavior recommended by the CDC, the conduct we've all been tasked to employ to keep those around us (and ourselves) safe - spend as much time indoors as you can, see as few people as possible, sit around and watch TV and order as much takeout as you can stomach - is little different from the symptoms of a depressive episode.

Life, even without lockdown, is mundane. Most of 'normal' life consists of commutes and needless meetings and mindless visits to the gym but crucially, it's broken up by moments of searing excitement, of novelty and change. The mundane can be tolerated because of these distractions or, even more so, in anticipation of them.

In contrast, life in lockdown is both mundane and absent of most, if not all, of those joyful distractions. There are no more surreptitious run-ins on the street with long-lost friends, no more Friday nights out where you got drunker than you expected and had stories to tell (or try to remember) the next morning, and in the COVID economy, a work-related surprise is more likely to be a sudden termination than an unexpected promotion. It's a different version of the mundane and in many ways, a much more pernicious one: it's relentless, it can feel malicious, and it compounds. When people talk about having hit their 'COVID wall' this Spring, I think it's that unending mundanity that they're talking about. It's a year of phone calls without any new updates to share, a year of doing the same job without mentorship or growth, a year of the same numbing routine, performed day-in, day-out, always with a lurking undercurrent of anxiety. But there are moments - like when a seven-year-old can find wonder and mirth in a routine Snapple cap (and he has found wonder hundreds of times this last year, at the expense of my suffering spleen) - where one is reminded to search for the beauty in the mundane because it is most surely there.

I wonder if this year of blankness has made me more capable of recognizing that beauty, if perhaps at the expense of my capacity to create it myself. I think the monotony has, above all, had a numbing effect, causing many of us to turn inwards in an effort to self-preserve and endure this period of unprecedented withdrawal. But I also think, like an astronaut returning to Earth from a year in the stars, in awe of things as unexceptional as a blade of grass, it has made us more perceptive of the ordinary, better able to recognize the intricacies of things prosaic.

I think, thirteen months ago, I would have still laughed at Elliot's Snapple fact bemusement. But I don't know. I imagine we would have been in a rush, running late to make some commitment. We honor each other, and ourselves, a little more now in our slowed down world. And yet the world that we return to once this pandemic fades away will be no less mundane than it was in early March of 2020. There will still be tedium and work calls that go long and drinks that you have to get with that guy. My only hope is that when we find ourselves in that slog again, on auto-pilot, something learned from the slowness of this past year will perk up and within ourselves, we'll rediscover a capacity to find beauty in places scarred by boredom and repetition. I'll cling to that hope, firmly, with one hand. The other hand has to hold my Snapple.