Saving Madame Bovary: Being Happy With What We Have

Tired of being surrounded by stuff? Tired of same old same old? Convinced that adventure always lies somewhere else? So was Gustave Flaubert heroine Emma Bovary from the 1857 novel Madame Bovary, and she killed herself. Fortunately, we don't have to. Nor do we have to be miserable, like poor Emma, who dreams of high life with the beautiful people, yet whom Fate has condemned to an ordinary life with an ordinary husband and an ordinary child in an ordinary town. But what makes her think the aristocracy is made of people any happier than she is? For them, that is their ordinary. We want what we don t have.

Bruce Fleming notes the problem: For most of us most of the time, life seems lackluster, a roller-coaster ride of helpless longing, rarely culminating in an instant of triumph. If we do manage to get what we're longing for, we are left with the next-morning headache of What do we do now? We want to be the exception to the norm, never the norm. But the quest for the exceptional is doomed to failure. The exotic, by definition, is rare, and it's hard to get. Worse, even if we get it, it's no longer exotic. It's our everyday. And then we have to move on to something else.

We all have to deal with the everyday. Saving Madame Bovary, shows us how to appreciate the ordinary which turns out not to be so ordinary after all. And that is good, because at the end of the day, the ordinary is all we have. We need to be ready to welcome it when it comes, and embrace it.