Rick Hanson reminds us to see
existence with delight, awe, gratitude, and wow!
Last night,
stressing about undone tasks, I glanced in a mirror and saw my T-shirt, with
its picture of a galaxy and a little sign sticking up out of its outer swirls,
saying “You are here.”
A joke gift
from my wife, I’ve worn this shirt many times—yet for once it stopped me in my
tracks. In William Blake’s phrase, the doors of perception popped open and it
really hit me: Yes we are actually here, off to the edge of a vast floating whirlpool
of stars, alive and conscious, walking and talking on a big rock circling a
bigger burning ball of gas. Here, now, nearly fourteen billion years after the
cosmos emerged out of nothing. What the?!
My mind
stopped yapping and I felt the delight and awe of a little kid who for the
first time sees a butterfly, or tastes ice cream, or realizes that the stars
above are really far away. Gratitude and wow and something edging into dare I
say it sacred washed through me. In a word, I was amazed—which means “filled
with wonder and surprise,” even “overwhelmed with wonder.”
Besides the
simple happiness in this experience, it lifted me above the tangled pressures
and worries I was stuck to like a bug on flypaper. Amazement is instant stress
relief. It also opens the heart: I couldn’t any longer be even a little
exasperated with my wife. Perhaps most deeply, being amazed brings you into the
truth of things, into relationship with the inherent mysteries and overwhelming
gifts of existence, scaled from the molecular machinery of life to the love and
forgiveness in human hearts to the dark matter that glues the universe
together. Wow. Really. Wow.
How? Opportunities
for amazement are all around us. I think back to that look in the eyes of our
son and daughter as they were born, blinking in the light of the room,
surprised by all the shapes and colors, entering a whole new world. Seen with
the eyes of a child, the simplest thing is amazing: a blade of grass, being
licked by a puppy, the taste of cinnamon, riding piggyback on your daddy, or
the fact that running your eyes over lines of black squiggles fills your mind
with tales of dragons and heroes and fairy godmothers.
Look around
you. This morning I sat down to my computer, clicked a mouse, and chanting
recorded in a Russian cathedral filled the room. Crazy! Imagine being a Stone
Age person transported 50,000 years forward into your chair. Glass windows,
pencils, flat wood, the smell of coffee, woven cloth, a metal spoon… it would
all be amazing.
Try to see
more of your world in this way, as if you are seeing it for the first time, perhaps
through the eyes of a child if not a caveman. Beginner’s mind, zen mind. If
you’re not amazed, you’re not paying attention.
Explore
“don’t know mind”—not “duh” mind, but an openness that doesn’t immediately slot
things into boxes, that allows a freshness and curiosity. The mind categorizes
and labels things to help us survive. Fine enough, but underneath this skim of
meaning laid over the boiled milk of reality, we don’t truly know what anything
is. We use words like “atoms” and “quarks” and “photons,” but no one knows what
a quark or photon actually is. We don’t know what love actually is, either, but
it is all around us.
It’s amazing
to me that people love me, amazing that people forgive each other, that those
once at war with each other can eventually live in peace. Consider people you
know, how they keep going when they’re tired, breathe through pain, get up yet
again to walk a crying baby, settle down in the middle of an argument and admit
fault and move on. To me, that a mother can embrace the young man who murdered
her son is more amazing than an exploding supernova. And just as others are
amazing to you, you are also amazing to them.
If we were
brave enough to be more often filled with wonder and surprise, we would treat
ourselves and others and our fragile world more gently.
I am grateful
for the awe in my life. Nature’s
beauty, the kindness of people, a delicious meal, life on earth, language, friends, the genius of scientists
and artists, and low-bottom drunks getting sober are some of my favorite
sources of awe.
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