Every single day
On a glory of sameness
My husband and I are what you might call “cliché collectors.”
No. That’s misleading: we don’t collect clichés, we collect expressions; and we don’t so much collect them as we spot, discuss, and mentally tuck them away. When inevitably they reappear, we note them to each other with a wink and a nod.
That said, I never realized that this is a thing we do until now, when I thought I’d write to you about this recent conversation:
Bill and I were having an argument discussion, and in making a (good) point I thought I’d already made, I began a comeback rejoinder with the word, “again.” Bill told me he didn’t like this and explained: “Again” at the beginning of a statement carries a tacit accusation that one’s interlocutor hasn’t been listening.
That’s not always true. Beginning with “again” can serve a different purpose. It can simply introduce a new example to further a point. But in the case of our recent contretemps conversation, Bill’s perception was spot-on. “Again” signaled my perceived need to repeat myself because I thought he hadn’t been paying attention.
Then came more conversation, this time considering phrases that denote the obvious, which is that the listener is being spoken to. Phrases like: “I’ll have you know,” “Let me tell you,” and “Just so you know.”
By definition, conversations are an exchange of information between persons. On that definition, the above phrases are redundant: presumably everything a person says to another is something she will “have you know” or is “for your information.”
“(I’ll have you know) I should be home by five.”
“I loved that movie (for your information)!”
But that’s not what we mean when we use those phrases. Here the speaker actually means something else: she’s miffed and feeling justified about it. These phrases (I’m telling you) don’t so much relay facts as attempt to put the listener in his or her place. (For your information) they are efforts at winning. “I’ll have you know” is a try for triumph.
Rhetorically such phrases have their place, but redundancy is a writer’s enemy. What does she want but to keep her readers reading? When things get redundant, the reader smells a rat: Does this writer know where she’s going with this? Does this writer have a plan? Am I wasting my time?
At best, repetition is deployed for emphasis. At worst, it’s a mark of inattention— or of actually having nothing to say. Perhaps for these reasons, it’s also a mark of young writing, of the adolescent essay, if you will. I’ve read too many essays that sound like a drive toward word count. The student says the same thing again and again, barely rephrasing, in a desperate effort to reach what’s shaped like a paragraph but is, in a sense, empty.
My favorite writing professor in college warned us about this. First and foremost, have something to say, he told us. And avoid at all costs what he called, “the Department of Redundancy Department.”
I put that in quotation marks because it’s a direct quote. All those years ago I jotted it down in my notebook’s margin because I couldn’t be sure he’d ever say it again.
Avoiding repetition in writing is paramount, but avoiding it in life is impossible. It’s actually a mark of human existence. Think about it: on the daily one gets up, gets ready for work, goes to work, works. There’s a sameness here that’s comforting, so familiar we don’t notice it.
But it’s also a rogue keenly suspect at this time of year. If you’re on social media or in academia, you know what I mean: photo captions of newly minted graduates and beleaguered teachers are all asking where the time went.
And where did it go? To sameness and redundancy. In March, my freshmen and I were deep in Mark 8, but I had to check my lesson plans before I could tell you that. In March— as in February as in April— I daily pulled into my parking space, put my lunch in the faculty refrigerator, unlocked my classroom door. The trajectory of Mark’s gospel, Peter’s declaration, and the ensuing shift in Jesus’ teaching all made for significant conversation in my classroom, but until I looked it up, the details of March 25, 2026, intermingled in a penumbra of sameness.
That sameness— the monotony, even— is often necessary. I can’t imagine teaching school without it: we thrive on routine. Anxiety is reduced through familiarity, and repetition facilitates assimilation of new knowledge, which can then foster capacity for even more learning.
The early months of this calendar year included a number of snow days for our school, creating a brief haphazardy that challenged that structured learning process. Yet even those interruptions are vague in all the similitude. Looking back at this semester, few events readily rise in my mind: my parents’ visits and one from Emma and Sam; the two-year birthdays of two grandchildren. A spring break getaway with my husband. A still and blissful afternoon listening to Verdi’s Requiem. Otherwise, life was a sameness: a grace, a comfort, and also an oblivion that runs toward forgetting.
Recently I came across a moving essay about monotony, specifically within marriage. The essay is in some ways a lament: after multiple miscarriages, the author and her husband don’t have children and won’t have them. She examines ways in which that absence contributes to a monotony that deeply concerns her. She writes, “Chaos and delight are interruption to monotony in a marriage and children bring both.”
She isn’t wrong. Just last weekend my husband and I hosted two of our grandchildren overnight. Both chaos and delight ensued.
But I don’t know that children prevent monotony. They don’t prevent sameness, anyway. Routine seems embedded in the essential dailiness of our lives, even the unpredictable, milestone-marked lives of children.
For their first five years, I kept calendars of my children’s doings. From landmark events like first steps and lost teeth to quotidian play dates and funny quips, I recorded something of each of them every single day.
Someone close to me remarked at the time that this was foolishness. Herself mother of several grown children, she asked me, “What are you going to do with all that?” The question gave me pause, but only briefly. The calendars were “a net for catching days”1 in my children’s fleeting, inestimably precious childhoods.
Did they solve the problem of sameness? No. I remember many things of those childhoods, and some of these I remember vividly. But rereading those calendars now would nonetheless be full of surprises because the ensuing days— even those days themselves— were also subject to routine.
Where did the time go?
This question belies others, ones more difficult to ask. Some of them are practical: Where did the time go might reflect questions about what we did with that time. Was it meaningful? Was it valuable? What was it? And some are existential: What does it mean to be alive? How one can live day in and out, physically present in the waking and going to bed and everything in between, and yet somehow miss the very thing one is living?
In those reflections, we’re aware of what C.S. Lewis termed time’s tyranny, its “unilinear poverty, ” a hidden power hastening us always forward. Its control over us inflicts an “always aching wound… almost equally when we are happy and when we are unhappy. For we are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished by it.”2
Astonished, indeed. Where did the time go? Here is presupposition, both for Lewis and the aforementioned essay: life should not be monotonous. It matters; therefore we should notice it.
Further presupposition: we matter. Our lives, our very beingness matters. When asking Where did the time go?, we feel this in our bones.
"Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes."3
"O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am!... Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath!"4
“As for man, his days are like grass;
he flourishes like a flower of the field;
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.”5
The Bible tells it straight: my life is fleeting. A mist. An evaporation. Dust turned to dust, caught up in the next breeze, disappearing on the wind.
The calendar’s grid, the plot of land, the Instagram square won’t safeguard any of it.
Our church services always end the same way. I’d imagine that an outsider would find it strange: on the invitation, the congregation stands row by row and slowly walks in lines to the front of the room. There we take a cube of bread from a basket and a small plastic cup of grape juice from a tray, and we return to our seats.
“The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, shed for you.” And then we eat and drink together.
Every Sunday this repetition. Some might say a monotony. But as I said before, repetition aids the memory. And what is it we need to remember?
That our very lives may be dust, but they nonetheless belong to the One who is eternal. We’re more than a little baffled: time remains a mystery to us even as our lives are immersed in it. But God isn’t baffled: “He knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.”6
What’s amazing is his love for this dust. Bought by him with his blood, our lives, in his view, are anything but monotony. He counts our hairs7, he holds our tears8, he sees and cares about everything we do.9
I need this repetition, one that pulls my head from the hourglass sand of my everyday and reminds me of the eternal: the God who was and who is and who is to come. The One who is always the same.
My life and yours mean more than we think they do, even more than we understand. This is true despite our oblivion: when we’re idly flossing our teeth, sitting at the traffic light, or grading an empty essay.
Ten Years On,Mary Still Tends the Lilies At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden and in the garden a new tomb...they laid him there." John 19: 41-42 Her forearms ache inside and out, sweat baptizes the ever-stony ground in this remembrance place as, she, the land's own resurrected daughter, born anew seven times over, tends the lilies laid into stubborn earth amid aftershocks of fear and joy, now they're vibrant in the gathering dark, a vow of things yet to come, the air is thick with memory, heady with her expectancy she lingers in the cool of every single day. Charissa Sylvia
Of course I’ve got a game for you, and I wonder if anyone can guess what it is…. Okay, I’ll tell you.
In light of focusing on repetition and the ways in which it can mar writing, I’ve littered this little essay with familiar expressions and idioms (and “littered with” counts, I think). Your response— should you choose to have fun (ahem)— is either (1) to guess (or count) how many of these occur in the essay or (2) name one (or two or three or more) of them in the comments.
See? Fun!
ON THE OTHER HAND, you don’t have to respond that way. You don’t have to respond at all. But you may choose to respond to the ideas of the essay themselves. I’d love that. Or to the poem. I’d love that, too.
It’s up to you.
Thank you for reading (or listening). Thank you for being here. Thank you for joining us if you’re new (Welcome!).
With joy,.
Rebecca
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
James 4: 14
Psalm 39: 4-5
Psalm 103: 15-16
Psalm 103: 14
Luke 12: 7
Psalm 56:8
Psalm 139: 1-4
A southern variation on "I'll have you know": "I'll tell you one thing..." and the more strident, "Well, I'll tell you one thing, right now...".
Approaching a milestone birthday of 70 this lovely essay warms my heart. All of the memories, some beautiful, some horrible, take on fresh meaning and a hint of eternal significance. The sameness is comforting. The penumbra bids me forward with anticipation of His faithful light through the shadows on each and every step and until the Day dawns brightly. Thank you Rebecca 💜✝️🙌🏽