I have had many moments of pure awareness in my life. Some of these have been during meditation but there have been countless others:
• watching sunrises and sunsets,
• looking up at a redwood tree over 300 feet tall,
• watching the tide come in over the rocks at the Maine ocean,
• holding my children moments after they were born,
• seeing my wife asleep next to me when I wake up – her face so peaceful and beautiful.
What those moments have in common is that they were moments of absolute peace and love.
That is one of the reasons I meditate most every day — to remember to notice and savor the beauty of everyday moments more often. For example, seeing a burly man walking with his two year old daughter, her whole hand wrapped around his pinkie finger, a server at a restaurant being so kind, seeing a film of ice in the winter over a sewer drain — the ice as thin and delicate as a crepe.
These moments are always available; we just forget that they are. When we notice them more often, we live in a different reality — we smile more often and others smile more in return; we catch ourselves when we want to scream at the person on the phone who is simply the bearer of bad news of her company's incompetence. And if we are snotty, we catch ourselves and apologize: "I'm sorry for being snotty; you're not the one I am angry with." And we do this more often — noticing the choices that lie in that space between things happening and our response. That noticing literally creates a different world.
We may still be busy more than we would like, but in those spaces between stimulus and response, we feel that sense of interconnectedness that poets, scientists, and mystics of all ages, genders, ethnicities, and religions have talked and written about:
• “If you knew what I know about the power of giving, you would not let a single meal pass without sharing it in some way.” Buddha
• “Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel.” Fred Rogers
• “Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” Robin Wall Kimmerer
• “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.” Rumi
In my typical daily meditation, when my mind is quieter, I focus on noticing the space between the thoughts. What is that space like? Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche writes about in his book In Love with the World. When he was younger, he left home and spent four years as a penniless, itinerant monk. On his first night on his own, he was travelling third class on an Indian train. He was overwhelmed. However, he had many years of meditation training and he used it.
"With training, it's possible to become aware of the gap [space] in-between our thoughts...What makes this gap so precious? Let's say we are looking at a cloudy sky. Some clouds are lighter or darker than others; they move fast or slow, disperse and change shape and dissolve into one another. Then suddenly there's an opening and for an instant we glimpse the sun. That opening in the clouds is the gap. The clouds represent all the normal content” of our almost always chattering mind. "We can get so caught up in the stories that we tell ourselves that we do not even try to look behind the clouds...But if we pay attention, we can recognize the gap, the fleeting space in-between thoughts. The gap between thoughts allows us to glimpse the naked mind, the mind that is not obscured by preconceptions and patterns of memory. It's that fresh glimmer that startles us into wakefulness, and reminds us that the clouds are temporary surface concerns and that the sun shines whether we see it or not."
Many have written about how busy our lives are. Jon Kabat-Zinn talked about how this results in spending so much of our lives on automatics pilot where the stimulus-response of life becomes stimulus-reaction. What he and others have pointed out is that when we can see the space between the stimulus and the reaction, a world of choices open which makes for a much richer life. For example, another response to the stimulus of:
• a stop light when we are busy is to take a few conscious breaths,
• seeing litter on the sidewalk is to pick it up or to be grateful there is not more litter,
• our computer freezing up is to smile (we have a computer) and press restart,
• a sudden toothache is to remind ourselves that we can go to a dentist if it gets worse.
A regular meditation practice is not the only way to enable us to notice that pause more often. Other regular practice can have that effect. For example, taking regular walks, time in nature, practicing various contemplative crafts like calligraphy, or taking time for reflection like journaling, reading, or poetry. We really have so many choices—every day, every moment — and remembering to act on those choices literally makes a world of difference!