I have been wondering how people cope with the mundanity of life that most of us can’t escape. Our exercise regimes often exacerbate the tedium of our everyday existences. Of course, this is a First World problem of the 21st century.
In our nomadic days we experienced the excitement of the hunt to procure our next meal – this could involve a long wait, a chase and then a finale when the prey was captured and killed. The supermarket scenario cannot compare to this. We go to the same supermarket, end up in the same aisles, grab the same items off the same shelf then cook the same meals. Perhaps waiting a long time in the checkout queue is the only ‘hunt-like’ aspect of this.
Exercise was once sporadic and functional. It wasn’t performed to up a monitor secured to our wrists, it was carried out as a part of survival. Now humans swim up and down the same pool, day after day with the same sequence of strokes, the same costume and maybe the same thoughts! We see them from the same bridge that we walk across to complete the same Bay Run we have been walking or running for decades.
In fact, with Sydney real estate prices always on the rise, most are too scared to move from their little piece of land in the fear that they may not find another and thus most are stuck to the same few square kilometres of suburbia, hardly moving out of it except if necessity (i.e. work) calls for it because the traffic on weekdays and weekends renders intra-city movement nearly impossible.
How do we cope with our dreary days? Well, unfortunately, some of us don’t! Others return to the same bottle shop, go to the same shelf and drink the same bottle of merlot with same person and, wow, that gives them that same splendiferous feeling!
Words by Lianna Taranto, baybitch@ciaomagazine.com.au
