The Average Day
Where reactions repeat
If you begin to work even a little on the day and its vexations and troubles, you then begin to work practically on yourself. But you must get to know your day and get to know yourself in relation to your day. There is a certain average day that each person passes through, apart from very unusual events. The events of the ordinary day have, as you will admit, a certain recurring similarity for each person.
Now suppose that you never realize this and never observe yourself in connection with the typical events of your average day, how can you even think your are working on yourself and how can you even suppose you can change yourself? Change of being begins with changing your reactions to actual incidents of the day. This is the beginning of taking your life in a real and practical sense in a new way. If you behave in the same way every day to the same recurring events of the day, how can you believe that you can change?
Maurice Nicoll, “On Work on Oneself” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 26)
This Working Note offers supporting subscribers a simple direction for practice — bringing the passage into your own observation and daily effort.
Working Note: For Today’s Inner Effort
Orientation: The passage turns attention to the repetition within the ordinary day and to your fixed reactions to it.
What to Notice:
Notice the structure of your usual day.
The same sequence. The same contacts. The same minor troubles.
Choose one recurring incident.
Observe how you meet it inwardly.
The thought that appears.
The posture of the body.
The tone you take.
See if it is the same as yesterday.
Do not explain it. Simply register the sameness.
A Small Effort:
When the familiar incident comes today, pause before the usual response.
Feel your hands or your breathing.
Let the first mechanical reaction remain unexpressed for a few seconds.
Then act, but with awareness of the reaction.
Remember: The ordinary day reveals you.