Here Is Where To Find the Essence of Life
We’ve got the wrong GPS coordinates.
That’s what we’re all looking for, right? The essence of life. The Truth. What it means and feels like to be a human being. All in a hurry, because we’re terrified of running out of time before we even fully realize that we’re here, standing on planet Earth.
That’s why we love intensity. That’s why we travel. That’s why we skydive, climb mountains, run, love food and seek love. It makes us feel alive. It gives us that shot, that high of endorphins or adrenaline that brings life into our human shells.
My thing was to take a one-way plane ticket and work remotely from all over the world. It took me three months to realize I was looking for the essence of life in the wrong place.
5,000 miles away from it, to be exact.
“We are all students of the same master: reality, with which religious institutions originally worked. The intuitive reality, says us… Master the twenty-four hours. […] Changing the air filter, blowing the kids’ noses, going to PTA meetings, tidying the house, washing the dishes, checking the dipstick — don’t fool yourself into thinking that all these chores take you away from more serious activities. These thankless tasks are not impediments to our ‘practice’ which must lead us to the ‘way’. This accumulation of chores is our voice.” — Gary Snyder
I took the liberty of translating this excerpt myself. It’s from the French edition of “Wherever You Go, There You Are” by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
What if we are looking in the wrong place? What if our idea of a life well lived was totally wrong, and more suited to Hollywood movies and adventure books than to reality? What if we had confused everything? What if we had let our childhood heroes become our real-life idols?
When people talk about their vacations, I get a strange feeling. I feel like they only “really” live for three weeks a year. Everything else is just waiting. Waiting for time, days, weeks and months to pass before finally reaching those few days of life. Isn’t that awfully sad?
What if the essence of life was in the everyday, mundane things? What if we stopped seeing our daily life as an endless series of things to do, and started to act with care towards each of them? Recognizing them as “life”, and accomplishing them with the presence they deserve?
I realized something on the other side of the world: whatever you do, if you do it with presence, it becomes enjoyable. It becomes a moment of life. Your hands or your brain are working, but you use that moment to be fully aware, fully present, sitting in time and space, here and now, and only then do you feel alive. Whatever the activity, as long as you are here, you are experiencing what it is to be a human being. It also works if you do nothing. Nothing at all. Consciousness is always there, even when it no longer has an object.
I’m not saying that you can’t find it in traveling, skydiving, and all those activities that humans have a fascination with. What I am saying is that this same feeling of being alive, the essence of life, can be found in mundane tasks.
The essence of life is in living. And life, as a human being, is to nourish your body and soul, to be alternately in your head and in your body, to move, to sleep, to laugh, to connect to others, to love…
That, to me, is what it means to be human.
For once, let’s lower our expectations. Let’s stop looking for more, better and further. Instead, let’s give our full attention to the simple things, and recognize in them the essence of things.
Today, experience it. Be mindful, fully present when you go shopping. When you go for a run or pick up your kids from school. When your skin touches the skin of a loved one. When you chew a mouthful of food.
Pay attention to how you feel. How this simple act centers you.
How tasty and intense it is to be alive. Simply alive.
