What's a chimera? A fire-breathing hybridization of goat, snake, and lion, if I'm not mistaken. It used to live in a place called Lycia, apparently, someplace in Anatolia, and it was related to the Hydra and Cerberus and all those fun characters.
The term "chimera" has a lot of meanings, all of which relate to the fusion of disparate things. People are sometimes called social chimeras if they seem to have fragmentary beliefs all over the spectrum (this is different from simply being an inconsistent pushover who changes beliefs with the group). A chimera in fantasy writing is, as the Greeks had it, a fusion of different types of animal, usually with powers beyond the natural. In an old anthropological text I had the displeasure of reading recently, the author referred to people of mixed ethnic heritage. In any case, the word carries with it a connotation of the fantastic, the aberrant, or the downright abhorrent. It's a story, or at most a whispered legend of something far-off.
"Chimera" is also the term used in experimental science to refer to mice (and other animals) with segments of genes from other animals, used in testing and research. The world, at present, is full of chimeras.
Jules Verne published a book in 1870 about a fantastic ship capable of extended voyages beneath the ocean's surface, powered by a set of self-sustaining sodium-based batteries and only surfacing to cycle its air supply. This, in 1870, was the height of madness; submarines existed at the time, but they had very little in common with our thoughts of such things. They tended to be tiny, slow-moving metal tubes with fairly shallow and short jaunts underwater and an inconvenient tendency to kill their entire crew at random.
These days, most of the United States' real naval power is in the form of submerged ships powered by the unmaking of elements, easily capable of circumnavigating the Earth without ever breaking the surface of the ocean.
The word "mundane" derives from a Latin word "mundus," referring to the world. Spanish speakers know the word "mundo," almost a direct copy, and so on and so forth. What Latin-speakers were referring to was the material, known world, the world detached from magic and the gods and monsters, hence the term in English as equated with boring.
The word was also deployed as an adjective, however, in a way that has not survived to our time. In this sense, Latin uses the word to mean clean, neat, or pure; other interpretations hold it to mean "elegant," "decorated," or "adorned." So really, when something is mundane, it's "of the world," and it's "pure, elegant, and beautifully adorned." I don't personally think that's boring at all.
The point is this: the world around us is one we're used to, and it's been this way for our whole personal experience. This is increasingly arguable, with the acceleration of technology and everything (the world even two decades ago was vastly different), but in general, we grow up in a world surrounded by things. Trees, cranes, cars, people, all just things that have always been, as far as our experience goes. And so, these things are "mundane" to us; that's just the world, nothing to be excited about. We become inured to things that would have been miracles in the past. Nuclear submarines are just things in the news, digital clocks are just things that occasionally beep at us to do things, and gasoline just goes in cars to make them roll.
Our culture has an increasing focus on the new and exciting, to the exclusion of all else. The iPhone 4 may be perfectly functional (indeed, someone living in 2000 would be highly impressed), but it isn't the new one. "New, upstart" bands burst suddenly onto the scene, and then fade into obscurity after a few months or a year, simply because they're not novel anymore. It's a highly adrenal, distracting, stimulus-based way to live; yeah, you've had a drinking problem a long time but damn let me tell you about this phone you can use to not think about it!
So my point is this: when you feel drained, or over-excited, or panicked, or whatever, just sit and think about some really mundane things for a while. Trees especially are a great comfort to me (being distant relatives, I suppose), but whatever works for you. The ocean, lava lamps, asphalt, doesn't matter, just pick something and consider it. Discover all the gaps in your knowledge of these things that are absolutely ubiquitous in your life, and contemplate how beautiful all these things really are. I'm not trying to espouse a happy-slappy hippie philosophy of constant happiness and oneness with the world or anything, but it's a nice exercise to unwind and retreat from all the frantic running around for a little while.
The world's full of cool stuff that slips by unnoticed! Look at pictures of geodes, figure out how dice are made, anything. I guarantee it'll do you some good. It's important to remember that not every action you take has to revolutionize business or anything, and you can just take some time to be suffused by the beauty of existing with all these great things. Abandon fantasies about the future and fears from the past and just inhabit the present for a minute. Is good, no?
TL;DR Sic transit gloria mundi is a phrase I found interesting to think about.
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