She rides a bike through open countryside. The sun shines on her face, strands of hair flutter lightly in the air. Her blazer, skirt, tights, shoes—even her hair and face—are marked with more or less dried mud.
She sings:
Riding a bike on sunny day
Doesn’t feel like any day
Riding bike on rainy day
Doesn’t feel like any day
Riding bike on stormy day
Doesn’t feel like any day
No day feels like everyday
Any day doesn’t feel like everyday
Everyday doesn’t feel like any day
Holiday doesn’t feel like everyday
She has gone through a plunge into the mud, and yet she sings.
I like musical repetition, the gradually shifting ordinariness—that’s also what the lyrics represent.
She rides a bike. She has freedom of movement.
Although we saw her legs in a street excavation earlier, now they’re hers again, part of the whole that is her.
She hasn’t lost any part of herself.
Riding a bike on a sunny day is not the same as riding it on just any day.
Riding a bike on a rainy day is not the same as riding it on any other day.
It’s the same activity, and yet it isn’t the same. Sometimes it may feel that way, but other times it may suddenly feel as if we’re doing it for the first time. Ordinariness is not ordinary, even though it is. From time to time, we emerge and take a breath.
The mud that clung to the presenter’s body now flakes off and falls away.
We can only guess whether she has undergone a gigantic transformation and freed herself from the expectations society places on being a woman. Maybe she has merely managed to temporarily shake off the bitter aftertaste, and, in the moment when she is alone she silences the heavy feelings and doubts and reminds herself that life goes on—that “the show must go on.”
Is it even possible for a human to separate from the worldly context and pressures that life in society brings? I’d say only barely. We cannot ignore the world around us and live solely in our own vision.
But what we certainly can do is think about things – to speculate, pause, disagree, dream of alternatives, and talk about them with others.
Because that is a form of resistance—a way to delay the automatic, unconscious validation of norms, their repetition and reinforcement.
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