Those Hot Summer Days When Nothing Really Happens and Everything is Wonderful

There is this one specific feeling that I always try to capture and be in, yet I often seem to have trouble evoking it. Perhaps one of the reasons I have so much trouble with educing it is because I don’t know the concrete name for it. Another reason might be because I don’t know what is it exactly I need to do to arouse that feeling. It is not just a single thing, or a thought, or an action, or an emotion that constitutes the feeling though, it is more so a kind of point in time where everything just “goes right”, and then I enter this feeling. Work doesn’t feel like work, chores don’t feel like chores, responsibilities are something you do with an air of dignity and joy, conversations simply flow, studying brings immense pleasure.

It often makes me feel like a child, with just how in the present I am, totally engrossed in the moment, enjoying whatever is in front of me, no matter if what I am doing now could be labeled by me or others as boring, hard, exhausting, “adulting“, or whatever other negative label of your choice. This feeling has escaped me completely in the last couple of years, the reasons for which I am still not entirely sure, but the more important fact is that I remembered about it and have been able to feel it much more often. The trigger for me becoming more conscious of this feeling (and the loss of it) recently has been an anime called Aria, adapted from the manga by Amano Kozue, and directed by Satou Junichi. While I only watched the first season as of writing this, the emotions I felt while viewing it already made a huge impact on me and have helped me elucidate this “ethereal” feeling that I am talking about.

The Beauty of The Everyday and Making New Memories in the Now

I am a very nostalgic and anxious person. I am prone to live in the past, dig up old memories, relive them over and over, with a bittersweet tinge to the experience, somewhat enjoying the memory, but also telling myself how temporary it was, how I can never go back to that moment and truly enjoy it fully again, not just in my mind, but also feel the excitement with my entire body, with everyone who partook in the memory being present as well, sharing in the delight. And then I start worrying about the future, about how difficult it is to make new memories that would rival the old ones in their excitement, intensity, genuineness. My mind is both in the past and the future, but very rarely in the present. Even though that is one of the most important conditions for evoking the calm feeling that I keep hunting for.

When I watch Aria, my mind is completely in the present. That happens very rarely, no matter what kind of media I consume, since even while watching or reading something, there are still 70 other thoughts racing in my head, over-analysing the story, trying to come up with theories for what is happening, while also worrying about work, and global warming, and how I still need to vacuum my room, and then for no reason remembering that old Schweppes commercial (seriously, why that in particular?).

But there is nothing in Aria that would trigger this tangent of thoughts in me, because the show itself is a lot about enjoying the present, seeing the wonder in the normal everyday, and making new memories along the way. One of my favorite scenes is the ending of Episode 5, where Akari and Alicia chat in the evening at the beach, after finishing with the day’s training in the supposed “Neverland” that Akari was kind of tricked into visiting. The dialogue, while relatively short, is packed with a lot of different topics – the transition to adulthood and the inconspicuous way we stop believing in fantasy; the permanence of memories; and how subjective is the experience of the world, putting of course a greater emphasis on how it is the positive person that sees the world in a positive way.

– “Can’t sleep?”, asks Alicia.
– “Sleeping would just waste my time here,” answers Akari. “When I was little, I believed Neverland was a real place. But when I grew up, I understood it was fantasy. When does that happen? When do we start thinking of those stories as fantasies? I can’t remember. We forget so much in our lives. It’s sorta sad.”
– “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
– “You think so?”
– “Because forgetting a memory doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned it, right? You don’t let go of the things that are important to you. They’re stored away, deep in the drawers of your heart.”
– “Yeah… That’s a good way to put it. The memories I thought I’d forgotten are just sleeping inside me.”
– “And when they unexpectedly peek out at you at times, you feel a strange mixture of happiness and embarrassment.”
– “The sea helped me to remember. Alicia! Maybe this island really is Neverland. Maybe the entire world of Aqua itself is Neverland.”
– “Perhaps. You’d never think this landscape was created by people. It’s an impossible world.”
– “And yet it’s definitely here.”
– “True.”
– “Thank you for inviting us here today. Somehow, it’s been a day full of wonderful things.”
– “Because you’re a wonderful person, Akari. The world looks wonderful when it’s reflected in the eyes of a wonderful person… What is it?”
– “The ribbon I lost. It came back. Right back to me… What? I feel… So strange…” “Ai, I can’t tell you why, but at that moment, my heart suddenly felt so full. Not with sadness, but with the feeling that everything was just so wonderful.”
“Akari, you used the word ‘wonderful’ 34 times in your e-mail today. It must have been pretty wonderful, huh?”

It is a wonderful thing to be able to experience every day with so much joy. I wonder as well when was the moment I lost the ability to simply experience the world around me with so much awe and wonder. When every thing that happened during the day feels so moving, inspiring, exhilarating. Although, according to Alicia, there is no real importance in trying to remember when that happened, since the memory is still there, and will pop out when the time is right.

That is how I think about the fact that I “forgot” how to embody this feeling which Aria helped me remember. There was a point where I felt it for the last time and then forgot about it. It would pop up at very random times, but then disappear and get forgotten again. But now is a time where it became important to me again, it came to the forefront of my conscious, and I am learning more about it. Trying to figure out and remember why that happened isn’t nearly as important as learning now how to elicit the feeling and contain it, because that has a way bigger impact on my life in the present, with a much more positive outcome.

You cannot experience the wonder of the everyday without being truly in the present though. That is another important motive that gets repeated throughout the anime, my favorite instance of it being in the second part of Episode 11, when we see The Three Water Fairies of Neo-Venezia get together for some snacks and a chat, together with their students who stumble upon their reunion a bit later in the day.

– “I thought those days when we trained together would last forever.”
– “Yeah.”
– “Someday…”, Alice suddenly speaks up, “Someday, that day will come for us, too. Someday, when we’re Prima Undines, Akari, Aika, and I… Won’t be able to see each other every day for practice anymore.”
– “That’s true. I doubt you’ll stay together like you are now. Time has a way of changing everything. Sometimes gently, and sometimes harshly.” Retorts Athena.
– “You’re right. I understand.”
– “But, for me at least, not everything has changed. I still enjoy my work, and besides… Now I have adorable juniors to teach, too.”
– “Yes, Athena’s right.” Butts in Alicia. “It would be a shame to lose sight of the fun we have now, by getting trapped thinking of the fun we used to have.”
– “We shouldn’t say ‘the old days were fun.’ We should say, ‘the old days were fun as well.’” Akira adds.
– “You can’t compare things that you truly enjoy, can you?”, continues Alicia. “Back then, now, and in the years to come, in the time you pass with the people you’re with, all sorts of little joys will come and go. If you can manage to hold on to each one, you’ll never run out of things that you enjoy. Always, forever. That, and one other point of advice: if you enjoy what you’re doing ‘now’, then ‘now’ will always be the most enjoyable time.”

How will you manage to create those joys, or be aware of them, or hold on to them if you are not in the moment when they are happening? There are a lot of quotes floating around about remembering the “good old days”, quotes like “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened,” which I am sure many have heard. Even though I have encountered a lot of different sayings about “remembering the old days” and being in the present, it was this scene that really drilled it in me the importance of constantly making new fun memories by experiencing them now. Things change whether we want them to or not, but even if things change, there are still things we enjoy, and with change there are new things that we can discover to enjoy as well.

Now I at least found some leads to this feeling I have been trying to describe. I know that it is only possible to feel when I am in the present. It is also a kind of positive feeling that puts focus on finding joy and wonder in the every day. Speaking of the wonderful everyday…

Wonderful Everyday Down The Rabbit-Hole, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Perspective

It would be ironic not to mention the visual novel that literally has “wonderful everyday” in the title. The novel, developed by SCA-DI and his team KeroQ, released originally in 2010, with an international release in 2017, covers many different topics, all of which are heavily based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (“LW”) philosophy and SCA-DI’s interpretation of his works, specifically the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“TLP”). One interesting thing I have come to appreciate lately is how the experience and journey of reading the visual novel almost perfectly mimics the experience of me trying to tackle TLP, and later LW’s second book, Philosophical Investigations (“PI”). Well, minus the disturbing and graphic parts of the visual novel.

I have tried reading TLP before, but even now many parts of it are still above my head, despite reading it several times, reading books about the book, reading explanations, watching seminars about it. LW claimed that with this book he solved all philosophical problems and humans can move on to do other things, which is something I’m sure many people had to look at with skepticism. Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism was a pretty popular movement of analytic philosophy in the 20th century, and LW built on that writing TLP, but even if I am interested in it intellectually, it does not make sense to me that you can break down the entire world into some fundamental logical “units” of “facts”, not to mention the color-exclusion problem was presented as a major wrench in this kind of philosophy.

Later though, LW retracted his statement that TLP solves all philosophical problems, and wrote PI, which presented a completely different view. Logical atomism was heavily criticised, and now arose a new methodology – ordinary language philosophy. The new LW claims that philosophical problems arise not because we don’t have enough knowledge, or haven’t developed our reasoning enough, or don’t have enough logical rules, or any of that stuff. Problems arise because of misunderstandings of language, because philosophers completely dismissed ordinary, natural language as not requiring any attention, and then use words in ways that do not adhere to their common meaning, creating the very philosophical problems they are trying to solve.

PI introduced a lot of interesting concepts, one of which was language games. To put it simply, they are not “games” in the sense that they are like video games, but rather games in the sense that the rules of communication differ a lot according to location, time, actions taken, participants involved, and so on, and because meanings of words can differ wildly according to all these variables, communication becomes a sort of “game” where you have to play with words that might have completely different meanings, and you kind of have to figure out which words mean what in a certain context.

This presents a conundrum though. If words always change meaning like that, how are we even supposed to try and start discussing difficult metaphysical concepts when we can’t even agree on definitions in the first place? LW would say in this case, that the job of a philosopher is not to try and solve them, but simply describe them as best as they can. “Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain.” (PI p.126). This also ties into LW’s later view that it is impossible to separate the mind from the environment; that purely abstract arguments are useless if they have no connection to the person’s surroundings and their language, and that understanding is achieved by pushing the limits of one’s language. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (TLP 5.6).

We came to this conclusion and accepted it, that’s great and all, but, what next? Does that mean doing anything at all is useless now? What should be my goal then? What is “useful” to engage in? Does that mean we should just stop engaging in philosophy altogether? Well, not necessarily…

Sure, according to Wittgenstein, things like “finding the meaning of life” are useless debates that will never end up in any concrete answer and is just a waste of time. But a waste of time as opposed to what? LW wasn’t so pessimistic when he made this claim, it’s not like he wanted us to despair over the fact that we will never find the answer or the meaning for our lives. Quite the opposite, as he himself puts it, “I keep on coming back to this! simply the happy life is good, the unhappy bad. And if I now ask myself: But why should I live happily, then this of itself seems to me to be a tautological question; the happy life seems to be justified, of itself, it seems that it is the only right life.” (Notebooks 1914 – 1916 (NB), 30.7.16 p. 78).

The natural next question then, is, what is the happy life? LW is also quick to elaborate that “In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what ‘being happy’ means’” (NB 8.7.16 p. 75). For LW, “agreeing with the world” simply means fulfilling “the purpose of existence“, in other words, being “content” with simply living, not concerning oneself with finding any purpose, except, simply, to live. (NB 6.7.16 p. 73).

Some time after finishing Wonderful Everyday and revisiting Wittgenstein’s books, I came to the realisation about how similar going through the visual novel felt like to going through LW’s books and the general mental anguish of trying to solve the existential crisis that sooner or later arises in all people, trying to desperately find an answer to why I exist, trying to find that one philosophical doctrine that will explain everything and rid me of all the despair and anxiety that plagues me. Similarly to the world of Wonderful Everyday, it felt like my world is “collapsing” and I have to do something, I have to find a reason, an explanation why, and what to do about it. I have to read every single writer and philosopher, I have to reason my way out of this depression, if I just accumulate more knowledge I will definitely come to the conclusion that will “rescue” my world.

But none of that ever happened. I often felt like I came close, especially when I picked up one of the famous writers of the last century – Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Jung. They definitely helped, but they didn’t have that final push, that punchline that would somehow tie it all together.

But the punchline eventually came, and, for me, in a very unexpected place, in the medium of visual novels. All of this journey, all the difficulties I went through, can be summed up with a simple, yet hopeful statement, that is the conclusion reached by the characters of Wonderful Everyday, and Ludwig Wittgenstein himself: “Live happily!” (NB 8.7.16, p. 75). I can definitely say that the feeling of fulfillment, of happiness, comes back in those moment when I am simply carrying out my task of being human, of doing what I know I am supposed to do, completing my work, helping others, developing my own wisdom, and doing it with joy and wonder, cherishing the wonderful everyday that I have the blessing to experience.

Wittgenstein, of course, was not the first person who claimed that the best life is a happy life, and not the first one to even conclude that a happy life is one that fulfills the purpose of existence. We can in fact find writings about this topic as early as Ancient Greece.

Eudaimonia, or Human Flourishing According to Aristotle

How to lead a good life, according to Aristotle, is one of the central questions of ethics. Unsurprisingly then, he wrote two entire books about this very topic, discussing what is virtue, which virtues are “better” and why they are such. For Aristotle, “human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.” (Nicomachean Ethics (“NE”), Book 1, Chapter 7).

Here, “human good” has been translated from the Ancient Greek word “eudaimonia”, which, as a funny aside, is a great example of Wittgenstein’s argument how philosophical problems arise due to the misunderstandings in language. This word has unfortunately been translated as “happiness” and used like this in a lot of translations, which does not capture the actual essence and meaning of the original word. A more accurate translation was proposed as “flourishing”, which I am a fan of, and will use from now on.

Human flourishing is achieved by acting out the best and most complete virtues. Simple enough statement, but the natural question then is, what are those virtues? It’s not like Aristotle just lists them out and tells us to live by them. Except… Yeah he actually did that. Aristotle’s list includes virtues like courage, patience, modesty, ambition, wittiness, friendliness… (NE, Book 2, Chapter 7). This should not be taken as an exhaustive list though, and Aristotle even provides a tool to be able to arrive at the virtue for ourselves, which he calls the “Golden Mean”. If we take some kind of virtue, we can have a deficiency of it, or an excess. For example, if we take the virtue of courage, excess of courage is rashness, but a deficiency of courage is cowardice. The “best” and “most complete” virtue with regard to feelings of fear and confidence is the mean – courage.

What I find cool about Aristotle’s golden mean rule is, for one, it seems to work great for me, and also Aristotle makes it clear that to flourish, you have to engage both in “moral” virtues, pertaining to the emotions, and “intellectual” ones, rising from the mind. I often see people discuss how they can improve themselves in regards to things like how to read more, how to work out more, how to be more disciplined, and so on, which are all very valid things to think about. What I don’t see discussed as often though is things like how to be a better conversationalist, be a better boss or employee, or even be a better friend, which I find really interesting that Aristotle puts significant importance on – the entirety of Book 7 is dedicated just to friendliness, as according to Aristotle, “For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods”, and “we praise those who love their friends, and it is thought to be a fine thing to have many friends” (NE, Book 7, Chapter 1). This falls in accordance with the stoic view on friendship as well. Not only is the stoic’s view that a human’s “function” is to embody the “good” virtues and execute them, therefore achieving this kind of “human flourishing”. The reason we even need to develop these virtues is not only that we live a good life, but by acting in accordance to the best virtues, we also help others. “The first thing which philosophy undertakes to give is fellow-feeling with all men; in other words, sympathy and sociability.” (Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium 5.4).

Reading a good book, going to the gym, doing a good job at work, or even cleaning up, bring me satisfaction in themselves of course. Finding out some new fact, hitting a new weightlifting PR, or finishing an important task at work can make my day better and make me feel happy. But for me, that would not be enough to truly feel like I am flourishing as a person. What good does me knowing that new fact do if I don’t use it to make someone’s day better, or advance my own career? And what would be the point of advancing my career if it did not have a positive impact on others? What’s the point of me building muscle if I don’t use my strength to help someone out? To stay healthy and be someone others can rely on when the time requires so? Why would I even do those tasks at work if I didn’t know that they enable the company to advance towards something marvelous that can improve other people’s lives? I feel in those moments at the height of flourishing, where I know I put in the work to do the right thing, it led to the right outcome, and I see it have a positive impact on others. The moral and intellectual virtues complete each other, as without intellectual pursuits I would not be able to help others, but without helping others the intellectual pursuits become useless.

I have read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics back in my school days, and the “golden mean” rule has served me well, as well as all other topics he discussed in the book. I often wonder though, if I know that it works well, and I feel good when I do it, how come I sometimes just seem to “forget” that it works, that if I just continue doing it, then I will continue feeling good?

David Foster Wallace and the Difficulty of Staying Conscious in the Modern Adult World

Consulting with the great thinkers of Antiquity is great and all, and of course 20th century philosophy is what we would already call modern or contemporary. But even if these ideas have stood the test of time, there is still sometimes that kind of discrepancy when we try to apply these “noble truths” to our actual modern life. It is difficult to think about “the wonderful everyday”, finding wonder in the mundane, the “golden mean” of virtue, or how you should “just live happily” when you have to do groceries in a supermarket that seems to just sap out all your energy with its confusing isles and inhumane fluorescent lighting, when you are already on the verge of collapse from exhaustion after your challenging day job, but you have to deal with the queue at the checkout line and deal with the annoying wheel on your cart that for some reason just keeps pulling you to the left and then you get annoyed that the person in front didn’t see the self-checkout open up and you have to ask them if they are planning on using it or not and etc. etc. it’s all exhausting and annoying and simply the opposite of wonderful, and then it puts you in a bad mood and then it becomes difficult to fall asleep because you now came back home later than usual and you are stressed and the lack of sleep causes you to underperform at work and…

It is easy to show an example of this, and claim that there is simply no such thing as a “wonderful” everyday in the modern world. The everyday is actually the opposite, it is full of misery and we are doomed to live it out day after day for the rest of our lives, because that’s how capitalism works and the west has fallen because we lost walkable infrastructure and third places and so on. This type of thinking, though, is what David Foster Wallace (“DFW”), an American novelist and essayist, would call the “natural default setting” in his 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College.

What DFW puts the most emphasis on during the speech is how not only the importance of a liberal arts education is about “teaching you how to think“, but rather “about the choice of what to think about.” An example DFW gives is the automatic idea one might have that “everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe.” However, this idea has to be challenged, one has to put in the work to alter this conception of self-centeredness, and people who are able to adjust this natural default setting are called “well-adjusted”. The real value of a liberal arts education becomes “learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.“

If you are able to exercise control over what you think, you can choose what you pay attention to and how you construct meaning from experience. As DFW points out, “there happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about“, which “involve boredom, routine and petty frustration“. These are the moments like the annoying story above where you have to do grocery shopping, or getting stuck in traffic, and getting annoyed at SUVs contributing to global warming, and how seemingly the world is just against your want to get back home and relax as quickly as possible. However, this type of thinking is automatic, the “natural default setting”, and many people think this way, because it is not a deliberate choice to think this way – it just happens.

What you can choose to do instead, for example when you get cut off in traffic by an SUV, is not get angry at the driver, but maybe consider that the person has a huge fear of driving because of a car accident he had years ago, and driving an SUV is the only way he can now feel safe. Perhaps the driver cut you off because he is taking his sick child to a hospital, and it is actually you who is in his way, and he has a much better reason to cut in traffic. Perhaps the woman who just screamed at her child in the checkout line is not usually like this, but she has just stayed up 3 nights in a row because she had to take care of her husband dying of bone cancer and is trying her best to be the breadwinner of the house to support her kids and felt frustrated that her efforts don’t seem to be recognised.

None of these situations are likely of course, but they are not impossible either. The point is that even though they are not likely, people will automatically not consider these options, because they are not the “personally annoying” ones. But it is exactly these types of situations where the power of choosing becomes important. Because it is here that you can exercise control over what you think, and once you do, as DFW beautifully puts it:

“It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. <…> This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. <…> That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing. <…> It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness <…> It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.”

It is common knowledge at this point that people of different backgrounds and different belief systems can derive different meanings from the same experience. Many people stop their education at this point though, and not consider that the next step is not only being aware of different interpretations of an event, but actually being able to consciously decide what events to pay attention to and consciously decide what kind of meaning to derive themselves. As DFW said though, it is incredibly hard to do, much more so do all the time; there will be days when we just flat out can’t or don’t want to. But it gets easier with practice. And the more we do it, the more we are able to experience the mundane, modern, consumerist existence as wonderful.

This kind of freedom not only involves attention and awareness and discipline, but also “being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” I find it interesting again, how similarly to Aristotle, DFW mentions the importance of making sacrifices and being of help to others. This can also be seen in DFW’s novel “Infinite Jest” (“IJ”), where one of the characters, Don Gately, attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as part of the Ennet House staff and also an alcoholic himself. AA has often been lauded as the one program that actually helps addicts stay off alcohol addiction, and according to former AA attendees, IJ’s descriptions of AA meetings are stunningly realistic and on point.

A lot of time spent in these meetings is in what is called “identifying” – AA members come on stage, introduce themselves, and then tell their story that has to do with alcohol. It can be anything, childhood memories, or how they broke sobriety few days ago and how awful and regretful they felt. Everyone listens and “identifies” with the story, they live through it vicariously, because fellow addicts are really the only ones who truly understand the pain of relapsing, of losing something important due to this drug. There are also people who have been sober for years, but yet they still come to these meetings, to continue helping the new people. Often the advice these people give is “just continue coming to the meetings”, “don’t try to understand why it works, just continue believing that it does”, and that “identifying is really important”. Don Gately continues going to these meetings, until suddenly he realises, months have passed, he hasn’t had a drink, and he doesn’t even think about alcohol anymore.

AA isn’t about some kind of complicated philosophical revelations or deliberate logical analysis of addiction. It’s really more about submitting to a higher power and redeeming yourself. Recovery is simply getting off the drug, but redemption is also helping others who are fighting this addiction, encouraging them to come to the meetings, making sure they keep coming, so that they too can get clean, identify, and start their redemption arc. Really the most important element in AA for me seems to be the sense of community, and how by helping others, we also help ourselves. Hearing the stories of others, and sharing your own, every single day, reminds you of how horrible this drug is, and keeps that thought on the forefront of consciousness.

Of course, this is perhaps a more extreme example with addiction recovery, but I posit that it is the same even in daily life with the common virtues. Smile, and the world smiles back. Treat others with loyalty, and receive loyalty back. Develop good habits in your personal life, and then help others do the same. And make the conscious decision to do the right thing and sacrifice yourself for others. It really is as simple as that, but we forget that constantly.

What is Your Wonderful Everyday?

Modern society seems more concerned with matters of the self: self-improvement, self-help, how to “get ahead of others”, how to “beat the competition”, the sigma grindset and mysterious lone wolf mentality. It is also difficult to find people who you can talk about these things openly – many are afraid of opening up, of showing vulnerability, and they will more quickly cower or make fun of you for speaking about that. But I haven’t seen self-centered people who you could really call as “flourishing”. I don’t feel flourishing when I get too selfish myself, it’s the complete opposite really. Sure, there are moments when I retreat into my shell because there is a matter that I really want to focus on, and that might appear as “selfish”. But the end goal for me is so that I can then better help my community, whatever that may be, my social circle, my coworkers, my parents, my neighbors. It is just not enough to only develop attributes of the self, and the highest human flourishing is achieved when we also contribute to the lives of others and are able to help them. That I think is also the difference between someone who is not only intelligent, but also a real leader.

It took me a long time and a lot of yapping to come to a seemingly simple solution that already probably seems so obvious to many people and has been encoded in many stories, myths, cliches, platitudes, proverbs, epigrams, and parables: seize the day! Be in the moment! Live happily! Do your duty! Smell the flowers! “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!” Aria reminded me of the feeling of enjoying the everyday, finding wonder in the simple things, and how precious it is to make new joyous memories in the now. Wonderful Everyday and Wittgenstein supports this view, that in the end, life should be simply about enjoying life. Aristotle brings in some ancient wisdom, guiding us towards how to achieve the wonderful everyday by acting out the highest virtues. And David Foster Wallace reminds us that in the modern world, staying on track and keeping the mind conscious is not as easy as we would like, and that we will sometimes forget about these obvious things, and we just have to be constantly reminded of them.

This is my everyday. This is the cycle I keep going in, of learning, realising, forgetting, despairing, remembering, “it’s over” and “we are so back”. The important thing is not to lose track of it and make sure to do it everyday, as DFW mentioned many times it is something you have to do “day in and day out“, and Aristotle supports this by saying that “for one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.” (NE, Book 1, Chapter 7). It is an endeavor of a lifetime, to be conscious of the present and learn to enjoy the moment over minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. But that endeavor is also part of the everyday.

So now I ask you, the reader – what is your Wonderful Everyday?