As we grow old, we look back on our experiences and realize how repetitive life is, both in the personal and in the social realm. We understand the only reason we thought we had new and unrepeatable fates was because we didn’t have enough life behind us to see their older versions.

Once you understand that life is recycled content, that nothing you’ve experienced or felt or thought wasn’t there before your time, you get dark and nihilistic, and wonder what is the point of churning reheated effort, ambition, and heartbreak. 

Not even love is original. Not even pain. We all suffer the same and for the same reasons. 

Our drama filled emotional landscapes yield no novelty: we’re functioning automatons programmed with responses, encoded with drives, we’re machines who hold themselves to god-like standards.

It becomes your familiarity, your safety, your emotional home.

The surprise comes from realizing you find enjoyment and fulfillment in making your hundredth ceramic pitcher, and there is nothing special about it, except the familiar way your fingers feel around its clay, the echo of recognition and the deeper connection to its essence. 

These are things you ignore when you’re just starting out, trying to assert your skill, looking for anything new.

It takes decades to feel the soul of the clay, to mold it as a spiritual act, with all your being and gratitude, for its own sake, for the very pleasure of repeating this humble ritual which from an outsider’s perspective looks abysmally dull.

Of course, this feeling underlays the daily grind, neatly folded under the to-do lists and petty aggravations and unnecessary minor crises and human weakness, and most of the time we don’t think about it.