Further Ramblings on the Ordinary

The Joy of the Mundane

By: Cheng Tong - Aug 28, 2026

 

We are conditioned to wait for the thunderclaps. The big promotions, the public recognitions, the moments where society finally turns its gaze toward us and nods in approval. Yesterday, I sat with a student of mine—a highly accomplished professional who has successfully accumulated those thunderclaps. Yet, as we spoke, it was not those achievements that brought tears; it was the sudden, shattering permission to let them go.

I told my student that life is not made of big moments. They are exceedingly rare. Life is washing the dishes. It is vacuuming the floor. It is scrubbing the toilet. We treat these tasks as the irritating interstices between the “important” broadcasts of our lives. Every single one of those mundane acts is profoundly sacred. Not because of what is being done, but because she is the one doing it. She is important, and her life matters, simply by existing in that kitchen or on that floor. Because in that quiet, unglamorous, exact second, creation is “doing” her. If she were not vital to the universe in the act of holding a scrub brush, the universe would not be expressing itself through her in that moment.

We weep at this realization because we are exhausted. We have been taught, from a very young age, to live from the outside in. We are handed a cultural blueprint that demands we construct massive, heavy monuments to our own egos just to prove we deserve to take up space. We use our careers, our titles, and our busy schedules as armor, terrified that if we strip them away, there will be nothing left underneath.

But the Dao teaches us that the armor is precisely what is suffocating us. When you are on your knees scrubbing the porcelain of a toilet, the universe does not care about your resume. In that moment, you are breath, you are motion, you are water and friction. You are the uncarved block. You are relieved of the burden of being “someone,” and are allowed the infinite freedom of simply being.

In our conversation, we waded into the heavy waters of two words that society constantly conflates: meaning and purpose. We are taught to chase them both simultaneously, usually by looking outside of ourselves. We frantically search for meaning in our jobs, hoping that if we do enough, our lives will finally mean something.

I told her they are entirely different. Meaning has nothing to do with what you do. Meaning has entirely to do with who you are.

Meaning is established only when we become whole. It arrives in that quiet, sometimes terrifying process where the person you tell the world you are, and the person you truly are, finally become one and the same. Carl Jung called this “individuation.” In Daoist practice, we call it returning to the uncarved block, returning to source. It is the cessation of the performance. When your inner reality and your outer expression align, meaning is settled. You no longer have to search for it, because you have become it.

Thereafter, whatever it is you do becomes your purpose.

Because your purpose flows from your wholeness, rather than trying to create it, the scale of your actions ceases to matter. Your purpose might indeed be curing a disease or writing a paradigm-shifting book. But it could just as easily be nothing more than being a good neighbor to an elderly person living alone. When you are whole, walking across the street to check on a neighbor carries the exact same cosmic weight as saving the world.  That act, that “purpose,” is the natural expression of your existing wholeness.

This is why the mundane is so miraculous. When meaning is already established within you, you do not need the thunderclaps to validate your existence. You can just vacuum the floor. You can just scrub the toilet. You can just be the universe, perfectly and quietly doing you in this exact moment.

The tears the student shed in my office were not tears of sorrow; they were the physical release of an exhausting, life-to-date performance. It is a profound, bodily relief to finally realize that you do not have to earn your place in the fabric of creation. When we stop demanding that our lives be a series of monumental events, we are left with the quiet, unshakable beauty of what actually is. The warm water on the dishes. The rhythm of the broom. The simple, miraculous rise and fall of our own chests. In those moments, when meaning is rooted deep inside and purpose is simply whatever task lies right in front of us, we finally stop trying to become someone. We just are. And in that ordinary stillness, the universe breathes a long, quiet sigh of relief through us.

I suppose these 800 words could be reduced to one simple word: presence; and the meaning I speak of is its predicate.