How is a typical day in your life today compared to 20 years back?
What can make your typical day different?
Do you have memories of days when something extraordinary happened?
Think about the questions above before watching An ordinary day. Then compared your ideas with the film.
Self-study activity:
Watch the film and complete the blanks in the transcript with the missing words.
You wake up today, like any other day. You get dressed, you make yourself breakfast, you brush your teeth. Everything you do starts to feel like some sort of elaborate (1) ... routine. After a while, you’ve realized that how much of your life is really an accumulation of these seemingly insignificant moments.
You go through the day only half awake, finding (2) ... in the mundane and finding ways to escape from it all. It becomes hard to tell one day from the next. The days turn into weeks, the weeks into years. And before you know it, your whole life has passed you by.
What was once and exciting and mysterious future is now behind you. You come to accept the (3) ... you’ve made, the life you’ve created for yourself. You tell yourself that you’re different, that you’re not just another one of the billions of people put here on this earth only to be forgotten.
But somehow, all your (4) ... will amount to something, but you know there is nothing inherently special about you. All your dreams and memories which you know so intimately. All your thoughts and feelings which define who you are; are destined to become nothing more than a non-written part of history.
And as the rest of the world moves on, all that is left are a collection of photographs that only provide (5) ... of who you were. But then something happens, right there in that ordinary day, maybe it’s only a kiss, a conversation, a song on the radio, something that makes you (6) ... , an incredible view. You are suddenly (7) ... how beautiful life can be and when it does happen, it doesn’t matter to you how temporary life is or whether or not your existence is in any way significant.
All that matters is, for that (8) ... yet eternal moment in time, you’re there to experience it.
Key:
1 well-rehearsed 2 comfort 3 choices 4 accomplishments 5 glimpses 6 laugh 7 reminded 8 instantaneous
