The reason children are excited to see what comes next is because they don’t assume they already know. They don’t look at their thoughts about what something is, they explore. They expect the unexpected. But as adults we assume that we know what things are like and how things will turn out, that the tree we saw yesterday will look the same today, and that our current attitudes and preferences will last forever—even though if we stop and look for just a minute, our past experience shows us none of that is true. We think a certain type of person would be the ideal friend, and then we become friends with someone completely different. Our attitudes and preferences are different at one time than another; from childhood to old age they are constantly changing. If we look at a tree for real, not just at our thoughts or preconceptions about it, it’s utterly incomprehensible—too many leaves to even begin to count, branches hidden behind branches, squirrels and insects and birds, and constantly every second growing, sap moving, leaves shifting in the breeze, light glinting, changing every moment. It’s alive.
Reality is alive. Every moment is alive and actually unpredictable—but believing our own predictive thinking casts a dullness over life and keeps us from looking and seeing with fresh eyes. We want meaning and beauty, but we limit our search for it to only certain sources, certain situations, instead of opening ourselves to find it wherever we are.
It’s not that we have to fight with our thoughts, it’s that we need to expand our vision and look beyond our preconceived state of mind. We need to roust ourselves out of our cocoon of thoughts and assumptions, and get up and really see.
© 2024 Shanti Natania Grace An earlier version of this was published as “It Won’t Be the Way You Think”
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My understandings on this topic, including not believing your thoughts and on the nature of preferences, have been directly influenced by Bodhisattva Shree Swami Premodaya.
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Dawn Revisited
Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits –
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You’ll never know
who’s down there, frying those eggs,
if you don’t get up and see.
– Rita Dove
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Clear Valley
The water that can’t be muddied
with any stick
is deeper than depth
The sky and the water
are a single
deepening blue
If you really want to find
the source of the Sixth Patriarch’s
fountain
don’t look for it
on the one bank or the other
or in the middle of the stream.
-Muso Soseki
Translated by W.S. Merwin and Soiku Shigematsu
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Letting go of our suffering is the hardest work we will ever do.
It is also the most fruitful.
To heal means to meet ourselves in a new way –
in the newness of each moment where all is possible
and nothing is limited to the old.
-Stephen Levine
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Squirrel and Photographer Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash
Two Squirrels and Camera Photo by Vadim Trunov on artFido
