Our great universe is flooded with a galaxy of wonders. It is a vast and unique canvas exhibiting a rich and kaleidoscopic diversity of fascinating objects. The world beckons us incessantly to savour its rich beauty and explore its endless charm. Surely life around is so amazing, we ought to hold fast. All too often we recognise it in hindsight or in our backward glance when we remember what a spectacle it held for us and then suddenly realise that it is no more.
But we remember with far greater pain that we did not see that beauty when it bloomed and blossomed and, that we failed to respond to love with love when it was offered, that we failed to enjoy the music when it resonated and didn’t appreciate the beauty when it glowed. A recent illness re-taught me this truth. I was in hospital for several days. One morning, I had to have pathological tests as well as an X-ray as I was down with a bout of searing fever and crucifying pain.
The required machines were located in a building at the opposite end of the hospital, so I had to be wheeled across the courtyard on a wheelchair. As we emerged from our unit, the sunlight hit me. That’s all that there was to my experience: Just the light of the sun. And yet how beautiful and wondrous it was! How warming, sparkling, stunning and brilliant! I looked to see whether anyone else realised the sun’s golden glow, but everyone seemed to be shuffling in great hurry, most with their eyes fixed on the ground, confused and dazed, their hands clutching medical files.
Then I remembered how often I, too, had been indifferent to the grandeur of each day, too preoccupied with petty and sometimes even mean concerns to respond to the splendour of it all. The insight gleaned from that experience is really as commonplace as was the experience itself: Life’s gifts are precious and abundant, but we are too heedless of them. In the bustle of our everyday life, we forget that at every turn there is always a piece of grandeur and a sliver of beauty, in the ocean of hopelessness, beckoning us to cheer us along the way.
When we’re speeding along, we violate our own natural rhythms in a way that prevents us from listening to our inner life and being in a resonant field with others. We get tight. We get small. We override our capacity to appreciate beauty, celebrate and serve from the heart. As we touch into this space of “here-ness”, we access wisdom, love and creativity that are otherwise not available to us when we’re on our way to another place.
