Lately I’ve been playing with a thought experiment: what if I was told the rest of my life would be completely ordinary? Not bad, just unremarkable.

My immediate response is, “Well, ordinary is better than awful” (forever the optimist), and then almost immediately (and embarrassingly), “This is not how life is meant to play out! I want something more!”

These questions came to me as I read Barry Magid’s book Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, a provocative reflection on Zen and psychoanalysis that upends some of the more infantile, and yet very natural, fantasies we smuggle into spiritual practice – and into life itself.

We rarely say these thoughts out loud. Perhaps we don’t even fully think them. But, as the book suggests, many come to spiritual practice to rise above the “banality” of daily life. We use it, sometimes surreptitiously, to become more accomplished, more “one” with things and, quite simply, happier. We even use it to feel self-righteous and superior. The spiritual path promises something special: a heightened experience, a compelling identity, something other than what we have right now.

With time we may come to realise that we will probably get none of that but something else entirely.

After furiously underlining passages in the book, I gave a talk on it, a kind of ode to being ordinary, and it was met with some resistance. Isn’t being “ordinary” simply acquiescing to the status quo? Aren’t the masses being duped by late capitalism? And is an ordinary life a meaningless life? Or, heaven forbid, a........

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