I rewatched a movie recently based on a book I really enjoyed titled, “The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.” The core piece of wisdom in the book /movie is, “There’s never nothing going on. There are no ordinary moments.” The message is clear – every moment is sacred and unique, not ordinary.
I think about how much of my day I consider “ordinary” because I am distracted by noise, clutter, demands, expectations, things to do, people to see, plans to make, goals to achieve. What triggered this was holding my one-week old grandson Henry, and listening to him purr as he breathed and slept. This was no ordinary moment. I was completely focused on his breathing and the movements of his little body. I was present and aware of what was happening.
So PAUSE right now and take notice of what’s going on — the extra-ordinariness of your life. The paradox is that we must empty our minds to “nothing” in order to become aware that there’s never “nothing” going on. It is through this unfettering that we become awake, aware, and alive.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person(“THERE’S NEVER NOTHING GOING ON. THERE ARE NO ORDINARY MOMENTS.”).
How many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing(BEING PRESENT AND AWARE OF WHAT IS HAPPENING). Take the laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself; such odd things as I have fallen over by accident, in walking in a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says that I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it is so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills. But I would add this not unimportant fact, that molehills are mountains; one has only to become a pigmy about half an inch high.
The gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months(OR ONE WEEK) old is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea. If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them(TAKE NOTICE OF THE EXTRA-ORDINARINESS OF YOUR LIFE), we should need no other apocalypse. Of children, we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child(OR HOLD ONE) and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing(HENRY); it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.
Everything is in an attitude of mind; and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I will sit still(PAUSE) and let the marvels and the adventures(WHAT’S GOING ON) settle on me(TAKE NOTICE) like flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never starve for want of wonders(THERE’S NEVER “NOTHING” GOING ON); but only for want of wonder.
If we imagine that a man wished truly, as far as possible, to see everything as it was, he would seek to be humble. Humility is the luxurious art of reducing(EMPTYING) ourselves(OUR MINDS) to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all(NOTHING), so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are–of immeasurable stature. That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature. But to he who has stripped off for a moment his own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around. These are the visions of him who, like the child in the fairy tales, is not afraid to become small. A giant, becoming larger and larger, only means that the stars are becoming smaller and smaller.