You know all those little repetitive tasks you do day in and day out? The Russians, I found out, have a word for those: byt.
Byt refers to the daily business that keeps a life going. Brushing your teeth. Washing the dishes. Making the bed. Figuring out why your internet is slow. Calling Spectrum to get it fixed, waiting on hold, getting cut off, calling back. All the annoying little stuff.
I learned the word byt on my podcast Fifty Words For Snow, where my cohost Emily John Garces and I search for words from other languages without direct English equivalents. Last week, Emily and I spoke with Natasha Kamneva, a native Russian speaker from Moscow, about this word byt. Natasha explained that the word carries more weight than our term “daily life.” It refers to the accumulation of ordinary obligations that can crush our spirit.
The Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky famously wrote in his suicide note that “the love boat crashed into the byt,” meaning his joy and love of life crashed into the everyday business of living. The phrase has become proverbial in Russia to express how romance can be killed by practicalities.
This Wasn’t Supposed to Happen
I tend to the look at the byt as an interference to my “real life,” the one I am supposed to be living if I could just get through all the dumb little tasks on my list. My real life, I feel, involves creativity and connection; laughter and love. It is my writing, my performing; my connection with friends and family. It does not involve figuring out why the garbage disposal is jammed, cleaning up where my dog has vomited, or trying to get the plumber to reduce his eight-hour-window so I can go out and get groceries again.
My response to byt is often some version of: Why is this happening to me? Not fair!
I’m starting to realize, however, that the problem isn’t the byt itself. It’s my expectation that life should contain a minimum of it, that a good life runs along smoothly with little tedium and no interference.
Expect the Half-Eaten Yam
For the podcast, we asked our reporter, Eric Giancoli, to record one ordinary day of byt. His report included back stretches, brushing his teeth, taking medicine, packing lunch, calling his sister about insurance for their mother, driving home, making dinner, and doing the dishes.
The dramatic low point was discovering that he had eaten the other half of his yam the night before and therefore had no starch for lunch. He called this “a shocking and brutal truth.” Then he had to scramble for another form of starch, a scramble he had not planned for. Something had gone wrong.
What if, I’ve been thinking, I began looking at the byt not as an interference to my real life, but as the essence of it? I’m starting to see that soaring creativity, artistic triumph, touching reunions, moving concerts, and heartfelt connection with friends do happen, and thank God they do. But they are not the main stuff of life. The main stuff is smaller and far less memorable: making dinner, picking up prescriptions, answering emails, putting gas in the car, looking for the charger, finding the charger, losing the charger, then looking for it again.
I have spent a lot of my life thinking of these things as what I have to get through in order to get back to my real life. I’m beginning to understand that they are my real life. Nothing has gone off course. Nothing has gone wrong. This is what a life looks like up close. The concert ends. Then you have to remember where you put that little ticket and find where you parked.
My new slogan is “Expect the byt.” Because even the love boat needs somebody to take out the trash.
