“Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, but of moments. You must experience each one before you can appreciate it,” Sarah Ban Breathnach once wrote. There is an old-fashioned charm— and lush, almost bewitching, lyricism— with which Breathnach sifts poetry from the sands of everyday moments, be it in her much-beloved daily devotional Simple Abundance, which illuminated the path to richer, more contented lives for millions of women, or Something More, her eloquent, erudite guidebook to excavating the buried longings and forgotten dreams of the authentic self. In Romancing the Ordinary: A Year of Simple Splendor, her enticing serenade to the sensual, Breathnach redeems the flesh from fire-and-brimstone and invites us to instead delight in our sense of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Though throughout the ages pleasure-seeking has been denounced as depraved and hedonistic, Breathnach contends there’s no surer route to the spiritual than through the flesh. A feast for the splendor-starved soul, Romancing the Ordinary overflows with wisdom drawn from the arts, literature, history and film- not to mention delectable recipes that will enrapture your inner gastronome, ranging from “divine fettuccine” to “not meant to be shared chocolate mousse.” The three central pillars of Breathnach’s wickedly indulgent philosophy are listed below:
1. life should be the grandest of love affairs
Though as a culture we’ve mostly abandoned the image of women as helpless damsels in distress, many of us still secretly equate romance with a dashing prince. Years after the women’s liberation movement, we remain spellbound by the enchanting fairytales of our youth, stories that suggested love of the non-platonic variety was the only possible route to adventure. The charm of an idyllic French countryside, the smell of earth after a spring rain, the contentment of a winter night spent warm and toasty by a fire: such everyday pleasures, we thought, could only be enjoyed when shared.
But Ms. Breathnach believes otherwise: women don’t need a significant other to be romanced— they can seduce themselves. Rather than wait for a debonair lover to woo us with his wit or court us with extravagant bouquets of flowers, we can do small things each day to revive our love of life— or, as the French say, our joie de vivre.
Sadly, instead of a lustful affair, our lives most often resemble a passionless marriage, stagnant after one too many neglectful years. Our day-to-day is overrun not by “wants” but “should’s” and “have to’s.” When was the last time we did something simply because we had a desire to? At the cornerstone of Breathnach’s philosophy is the belief that life should be a high-spirited soiree, exuberant, filled with longing and laughter.
“What makes the blood rush to your head? The fragrance wafting out the doorway of a chocolatier?…The silky squeak of a taffeta slip? The buttery softness of a new pair of leather gloves? Biting into a liquor-filled chocolate? Your cat licking your face? The first sight of forsythias in spring? Discovering a new-to-you book by your favorite author?” Breathnach implores us to consider.
Ravish your senses, seduce yourself with the sweet, secret yearnings of your own soul, and transform your humdrum marriage with life into a red-hot love affair.
2. leisure isn’t decadent or self-indulgent— it’s an essential form of self-care
“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know any,” poetess Sylvia Plath once quipped. A soothing soak in a hot bath, a tattered book of beloved poems, a luscious cup of hot cocoa: these little acts of self-cherishing may be simple but they have the profound power to restore a frazzled soul. Yet few women pause to pamper themselves. Why?
One can blame the American work ethic, a legacy inherited from our rigorously disciplined Puritan grandparents. Much like our forefathers, who believed hard work and strict self-denial brought glory to God, Americans worship at the altar of productivity and despise nothing more than idleness. Product-oriented and accomplishment-obsessed, we prefer the gratification of checking another item off our to-do list to an unhurried afternoon with nothing “useful” to occupy us. In fact, leisure and laziness are so inextricable in our society that most women are ridden with guilt when they so much as take a moment for themselves. Workaholism is a pernicious pathology made all the more perilous because it’s supported and sanctioned by our culture: not only are we the only country in the industrialized world to not offer paid family leave, we’re a nation that shames those with enough self-respect to call-in sick when they’re ill. Rarely, if ever, do we allow ourselves the “luxury” of missing work- even when we’re confined in bed with a 103 degree fever and a mountain of tissues.
But though our dystopic capitalist state assesses human worth by mechanical notions of input/output, leisure is essential to caring for ourselves. A blissful reprieve from the day-to-day ennui of our twenty-first century hamster wheel, a few hours of leisure well-spent can help us once again delight in the world. And here I must make a distinction: by leisure I don’t mean in the contemporary sense of the word but rather in the classical. Though today leisure has come to signify an aimless frittering away of time in trivial pursuits, to the ancient Greeks, leisure, or scholé (interestingly the linguistic progenitor of the English word for school), was a time for learning and contemplation indispensable both to the advancement of civilization and the expansion of the human soul. Whereas we in the modern era preach the gospel of work, the ancients viewed labor as a debasement of our higher selves. Manual labor was seen as a necessary evil, required for survival but a hinderance to nobler intellectual pursuits. It was only when man was free of the shackles of burdensome toil, they believed, that he could devise, dream, and discover truth.
Indeed, throughout time, leisure has been the fountainhead of all progress. The most noteworthy human achievements— the greatest art, the most pioneering ideas of philosophy, the spark of every epoch-making scientific breakthrough- were conceived in leisure, in moments unburdened by duty or, as Bertrand Russell once said, in periods of “fruitful monotony,” be it Alexander Graham Bell solving the puzzle of the harmonic telegraph while strolling through a bluff overlooking the Grand River or Mozart noting that is was during promenades in the park that his ideas flowed most “abundantly.” As Brenda Ueland observed in her timeless If You Want to Write, “The imagination needs moodling,- long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering” to cultivate ideas.
3. we can exalt our lives by being artists of the everyday
What constitutes “art” and what qualities confer the esteemed title of “artist” onto a mere aspirant are questions that have engrossed man for millennia. Jacques-Louis David believed the artist was one who could execute his vision: “To give a body and a perfect form to one’s thought, this—and only this—is to be an artist,” he remarked. Henry Miller argued the artist was the “unrecognized hero of our time— and of all time” whereas Georgia O’Keeffe held that the artist was simply someone who filled “space in a beautiful way.” Sarah Ban Breathnach’s definition is perhaps most similar to Mark Getlein’s: the purpose of art, he asserted, is to “create extraordinary versions” of ordinary things.
But unlike these writers and artists, Miss Breathnach contends art isn’t only confined to easels and paintbrushes— art can be made of the everyday. As fellow poet of the prosaic Henry David Thoreau so elegantly phrased, “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” Much as Cezanne could glimpse the miraculous in something as mundane as a bowl of fruit, we can exalt our lives by elevating the ordinary to the status of ritual. Brewing coffee. Reading the morning paper. Setting the table. Most of us hurry through these daily rounds, accustomed as we are to their trivialities and trifles. But what are diapers and groceries and dry cleaning if not the material for the greatest masterpiece— life itself? The artist can only discern the possibility for art if he scrutinizes his subject and carefully renders its details: the intensity of its colors, the outline of its shapes. To be an artist of the everyday we must act with love, reverence and a similar sense of heartfelt attention. Rather than carelessly throw on the first thing in our closet and barely brush our hair, why not take the time to establish a real beauty routine and transform the early morning bathroom rush into a glorious retreat of self-pampering and self-care? why not do a face mask and paint our nails? If we take a brief respite from our habitual ways of seeing, if we conduct ourselves with the attentive eyes and receptive minds of artists, life can be our magnum opus.
polarized into warring ideological camps whose central occupation is defending their own belief’s fortress. Division seems to capture the spirit of our age as the very fabric of society has begun to unravel along racial and cultural lines— lines we thought we transcended half a century ago. Rather than build bridges of tolerance and understanding, we erect barriers of bias and bigotry until more and more we conceive of those different from us as unworthy of mercy— that miraculous human ability to forgive the unforgivable. But why should we be merciful to those we deem loathsome? Why pardon when we can punish? Why forgive those who’ve done us wrong? 