Written by Ty Hopkins

1/31/2020, 2:00 AM (COVID-19 Lockdown day 17 or 18 or thereabouts, depending on what you count as the starting date)

Yesterday afternoon, with homeschool 75-percent complete for the day, (yes, that’s how even we dads mark the passage of time these days) my 12-year-old shuffles up to me, all slumped shoulders and dejected lips, and moans, “Dad, what is the point of even existing?” He is a little bit like Calvin. (As in Calvin and Hobbes, from the comic strip, not his namesake the French Reformer.) I failed to have a ready answer. I was caught off guard.

Well, if you're an enneagram type four (romantic, sometimes hopeless) like I am, there’s no better time to tackle such a riddle than at two a.m., which it is now. At least, that’s the time a decent answer is most likely to finally come to you. So, picture me hunched over a typewriter in film noir lighting at two a.m., swilling black coffee and chain smoking. (Though in real life I only do one of those at a time.)

Of course I don’t actually own a typewriter, and right now I wish I were hunched over an expensive device. But times being what they are, I can’t find my laptop, because my children have been serially swiping it to binge watch PJ Masks, Wild Kratts, and YouTube videos about handicrafts or cats. So instead, I am writing this by hand with a cheap Bic pen. Strangely, that is actually not ordinary anymore.

“Why Exist?” Hmm. I suspect what my 12-year-old is struggling with, as he daily slogs through homeschool and chores only to wake up and do it all again the next day with no hope of a game of laser tag or a romp in the woods to break up the monotony, is that a prolonged period of nothing but the daily grind with little to look forward to starts to feel frighteningly close to meaninglessness. We just get overwhelmed with the ordinariness of it all.

I fear to dive too deeply into the waters of contemplating the holiness of the ordinary, since I’ve heard that some women in my church are studying a book on that subject which is doubtless a more well-digested and erudite exposition on the matter. So I’ll content myself with a monologue that is more wryly ironic. Or at least you can read it in one sitting. And besides, as all the enneagram books tell you, what the hopeless romantic (me) fears more than anything else is being ordinary, so I really have a hard time believing all that business about the blessedness of dishwashing and diaper changing. (See? My enneagram reference at the outset wasn’t just a gratuitous nod at the currently trendy and Twitter-worthy in Christian circles.) I am actually particularly disposed to fear the ordinary, which we are getting an outsized serving of these days.

Probably you’ve noticed that being on lockdown takes from us all the special occasions and festivities, all of which happen in relationships and community (spring baseball games, Passover seder, Easter dinner, anniversaries and birthdays, graduations, and just plain old parties, movies, and game nights). Not only have we lost the special but we have even lost the slightly-interesting-but-still-mostly-ordinary things like getting coffee or going to the bank. We have moved from the ordinary to the ultra-ordinary. The stay-at-home directive doesn’t just leave us with only the ordinary but actually emphasizes the ordinary. Does anyone else feel like there are now somehow more counters to wipe and doorknobs to fix than there used to be?

Anyway, rather than extol the sacredness of dishwasher unloading, what I actually set out to do here was to acknowledge that it’s pretty easy for repetitive ordinary routines to feel meaningless. Mr. Downtrodden-12-year-old is right: we are just going to have to do it all over again tomorrow. What’s the point? What’s the meaning of it all?

This question gives me pause. For two reasons. One, my feeling overwhelmed by the ordinary causes me concern for the baseline health of my soul, because intuitively I know those people are right. There is something sacred about diaper changing, and I would do well to just embrace that. And two, why is it that we (and my 12-year-old type four and I in particular) are just so insistent that things mean something? Moreover, this overdose of the ordinary seems to make every one of us crave meaning all the more.

I need to puzzle this out in a second entry at some future uncivilized hour of the morning, but just as a start: intuition tells me that this aching desire for meaning is closely linked with our desire for goodness, which we just can’t live without. We seem to be born with our intense and intuitive sensitivity to goodness. It is right at the very core level of our essence, because our insatiable thirst for goodness is an expression of the fingerprints of our Good Creator on our hearts.

I’d like to explore the relationship between meaning and goodness in a follow-up cobbled together at another two a.m. session later this week, because who can find the mental space to compose clever commentary during daylight hours with six people crammed into your house ALL DAY LONG?