One of my favorite non-regular events are fire drills. Unlike other somewhat-predictable events, fire drills disclose a telling weirdness that forces us to relax momentarily. When we are drilled on our response time to a non-existent threat, we are forced to leave our normal routine and mill about one another nonchalantly or sometimes with concern but almost always with little to entertain ourselves but each other.
Being outside in such a non-purposive way is unfamiliar and a little strange to us, and some even attempt to break the coda of the drill as quickly as the disturbing calm sets in. It’s as if we don’t know what roles to play when we leave the scripts of working with or spending leisure time about one another.
And the pause reminds us also of the rhythm and pace of our lives lived, always doing, working, playing, being, never-ceasing. It is the exception to the rule of the world of work and a world based on the production of something, the creation of value. Evidence of the specific way in which we govern and inhabit space and occupy our lives.
Eventually, we brave the awkwardness of losing our roles or wimper in their temporary bereavement, but often we recover, and we move forward, reprising our scripts and routinized selves.
And we do so as if nothing had happened in the first place, but for it, for the experience, we know each other better, and for a brief moment, see one another as actively-coping beings and not finished, finishing products. In the process, we inevitably, if implicitly acknowledge our basic meaning-seeking, meaning-creating selves that inhabit a shared, everyday-created, everyday-reconstituted world.
