Aesthetic Realism associate and writer Miriam Weiss says:

I once felt that the everyday world—including my family, school, even our New York City neighborhood—was humdrum and boring. I played off what was close to me and customary against what was far-off and mysterious, and was restless for something really exciting to happen. But even as I studied foreign languages and made plans to live in Asia, I soon felt the need to run back to what was more familiar and, I thought, safer, and this troubled me.

In his surprising definition of Everydayness, from his 1945 work Definitions, and Comment: Being a Description of the World, Eli Siegel shows philosophically, scientifically, that there is no rift between the largeness of the world and our ordinary moments. In fact, he makes clear, the ability to feel comfortable and at ease in the midst of seemingly day-to-day happenings is, in itself, awe-inspiring and thrilling. What is explained in this definition meets the hopes of everyone as it shows the world can be liked because it is a oneness of opposites—the warm, secure everyday and the illimitably grand! Mr. Siegel writes:

Everydayness is the feeling of existence as close, expected, customary.

The everyday feeling is as hard to express as any. It is taken for granted, but much, much had to be before it could be. Going to a grocery, getting up in the morning, meeting a person we expect to meet, eating breakfast, finding a chair where we expect to find it, seeing that our clothes have buttons—are aspects of everyday feeling; but seen from the viewpoint of existence as a whole, they are strange and wonderful. That people should feel warmly familiar, routinely intimate, unsurprisedly comfortable, in expected and fairly comfortable milieus—from the point of view of time as a whole, space generally, matter in itself, motion unadorned, existence straight—is a grandly amazing state of affairs.

We go about and we feel, or can, that things are as they well may be anticipated to be. There is a dimension of solid usualness about. When we consider this warmth in its place among all things, a street in a town near the Mississippi, or a bank in New York, or a cottage outside Philadelphia, or a side street in Chicago becomes a thing astonishing as any. It took a long time for the world in any way to be taken consciously for granted. >>Read the complete definition and comment