This Startling Life

Implicit in this quote by Emily Dickinson is a juxtaposition between living and not living. Living evokes a richly textured awareness of one’s experience in the moment. It requires letting in information from our senses: what are we hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling and seeing right now? The antipode of this vibrant, “startling” experience is… thinking: thinking about what we might experience, thinking about what we have experienced. We can’t simultaneously be experiencing life and thinking about life.

This reminds me of two other quotes: one ancient and one modern. The ancient saying goes, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” In other words, thinking about life is not the same as living life. (As an aside, I often use this quote to remind myself that reading books about meditation is not the same as meditating - it reminds me to carve time out for formal practice).

The modern quote is one I heard uttered by Judson Brewer (MD, PhD, Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center), “The thinking mind doesn’t hold a candle to the feeling body.” He was explaining that when we find ourselves caught in thought, particularly anxious thought, we can tune in to the body to reconnect with life as its unfolding (vs. how we imagine it unfolding or how we remember it unfolding).

It’s fascinating to recall that Emily Dickinson spent much of her adult life in seclusion, and yet she still found life “startling”. In moments when we feel bored, we might try tuning in to all that our senses have to offer, opening to the possibility that this act of living, in and of itself, might be ripe for discovery. We might find that this habit of noticing - one breath, or the sound of wind chimes, the smell of a bowl of oatmeal, the tastes of a ripe strawberry, the feel of a cool glass in our hand, even the tightness in our right shoulder - builds on itself, with each day offering more moments of life fully lived, and, in the end, perhaps we’ll realize living is so startling that it leaves little time for anything else.

We hope you’ll join us this week as we make time together to build the habit of living.

May all beings everywhere without exception live fully,
Your CMP family