An Everyday Person

In Spanish, you can describe an ordinary person as “Una persona normal y corriente”. It has a nice rhythm when you say it out loud, so I wrote it down and kept it.

Normal means “normal” or “ordinary”. Corriente can also mean “ordinary”. Putting them together is a kind of emphasis—so, in my head, it becomes: an everyday person, ordinary to the point of being almost painfully ordinary.

Corriente also carries the meaning of a current, like flowing water. That gave me this image: someone drifting in the current of their times—an everyday person being carried along, while the “heroes” are the ones who shape the era and create the current.

So many things are smaller than the tide of the times: whether your investments pay off, whether you happened to join the right wave, how far your effort can really take you—sometimes it’s simply less than what the era decides for you.

It sounds pessimistic, but I think it’s just a way of understanding the world: knowing that personal effort and personal choices have limits, and being aware of those limits.

These days, I came across a passage in Happy Ghost Island (「幸福的鬼島」), and it clicked with the thoughts above:

“…And whether Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule or under the Kuomintang’s authoritarian government, they lived quietly and worked hard, hoping to find a bit of joy and dignity in troubled times.”

An everyday life, inside an irresistible current—still trying to live in the way I truly want.