I’ve never been much of a morning person. I wonder if that’s partly because often the things I had to wake up to were not things I looked forward to. Sometimes I even dreaded what laid before me. School in the public school system never agreed with me. I would wake up and know I had to catch a bus, going to someplace I really didn’t want to go, to see many people I really didn’t want to see. But like most of us, I learned to adapt. I had to be at school I think at something like 8:00 or 8:30, and the bus ride took like an hour, so I had to be at the bus stop at 7:30. Even now, I can’t believe I did it, and made it through. This doesn’t mean that I can’t wake up. I woke up every day, and later in life as I grew up, I learned to wake up when I needed to wake up. If I have a flight to catch at an early hour, I can wake up. I pretty much can program my sleep schedule to just about anything. But physically waking up I think is only part of waking up. There’s a lot more.

Now when I wake up, and begin blinking, I notice it more. I notice that yesterday really is gone. All the feelings I had about yesterday, all the feelings, all the stress, all the preoccupation. I notice when I wake up there is a small space when first awakening of openness. All the problems from yesterday could arrive later in the day again, even after a few blinks, all the same concerns from yesterday can crowd in, but right when I wake up, there is the sense of just being awake, just lying in bed, just being there. Just for a moment. I’ve heard of people who have some kind of practice when they first wake up. I know someone who as their feet touch the floor, they just say to themselves: grateful. They’ve been doing this for 20 years. A few years ago I started a simple practice, one that I can do no matter what, no matter how I’m feeling. No matter what state my body or mind is in, there is something I can always do.

When I first become aware that I’m awake, usually after more than a few blinks, I just say to myself silently: “I made it.” That’s it. I remind myself I made it through the night, and I know now like many of you, that it’s not a guarantee. “I made it.” I’ve already achieved the most important thing today, the most critical: I’m alive, and this next part is just as important: I know I’m alive.

I’ve heard that spiritual practice is just noticing the obvious. I think that’s true. I don’t think we need to have some kind of special experience, something out of this world. This world is wondrous enough. The vision for what our life can become in this world together – this is quite wondrous. The vision to notice what our life already is right now, without any effort on our part, the grace of it all. The fact that we were born without asking for it.

 

The fact that our bodies decided to wake up, and that we can blink. The fact that we as humans can know we’re awake, which tells us that we do have some agency, some awareness that gives us the capacity to appreciate our life.

During the pandemic, Sir Patrick Stewart started recording himself reading one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He would read one a day at his house, often in his short sleeves. He had been working on these sonnets for decades: working on them line by line, letting them work on him, training his voice and body to communicate the nuance and depth of them to an audience. And you see all that as he simply reads them, often with reading glasses, the decades and years of being awake to what was before him.

Many people I know are not big fans of ritual. They find doing something regularly with consistency boring or uninspiring. I once felt the same way. I feel different now.

 

I now notice that doing something regularly and with consistency opens up the details, the nuance, and it allows a kind of relaxation that opens up our consciousness to something that is deeper than discursive thinking, which is our usual way of relating to the world. Thoughts like this is better than that, I want this, I don’t want that, why is this thing happening, why isn’t this happening. When ritual falls prey to our usual way of thinking – this is good and should never be changed, then it loses its power and meaning. But if we engage something regularly over time without venerating it as something that is special or something that is better than something else, the act of doing something consistently begins to work on us differently. We also don’t need to invent ritual for ourselves all the time to experience this – it’s built in our life naturally. We wake up, we go to bed, we eat, we wash our hands, we use the restroom, we use our phones, we move from one place to another, often in similar ways, sometimes at similar times. All of this is built in.

Noticing this is entering a kind of eternity, we enter a stream that predates our birth and will take place after our passing. Creatures waking up, going to bed, creatures seeking food, shelter, water. All the things we do in a normal day, much of it is built into the basic movement of life itself, life expressing itself through a human, a bird, a squirrel. We get to realize we’re part of that. We don’t need to try to be part of that. We’re already part of that, and noticing that changes how we feel about waking up.

On particularly grumpy days, when I wake up feeling in a funk or out of sorts, I take a moment to recall that this morning someone is waking up excited to start their first day of work for something they have worked their entire life for. A mother today is waking up enamored to see her newborn sleeping. The birds are awake, glad to see the birdseed that we put out for them. When I take time for this, I still feel grumpy and feel my life is full of problems, but somehow I feel different about my problems.

 

I let my problems just be problems, and sometimes I take time to recall those who are waking up today stressed out with overwork, those who are waking up hungry, those who are battling addiction, waking up in need of something, something beyond drugs or alcohol. And that imagining shows me that I don’t have the capacity to manage the breadth and depth of waking up. There is a lot that is awakening on this day, much of it joyful, much of it dire, and much of it mixed together with both. I think the latter is closer to the truth – all of it together.

I found for myself there are usually good reasons why I avoid taking the time to notice what’s happening, either with myself or with loved ones, or with the world. And the usual reason is that deep down I still think it won’t make any difference. It doesn’t make any difference whether I notice or sleepwalk through my life. Much of the trouble may still be there. I know enough to know it doesn’t always feel pleasant to bear witness and notice. In fact it can make things feel more difficult, especially at first.

So why take the time to really notice that we’re alive, to notice what’s happening, if it seems useless? I think part of my response to that question is particular to my own way of thinking, that perhaps is shared by some of you. I’ve long had a conviction, you could call it faith, that there is more to life than suffering. It doesn’t take much imagination to see a world that is suffering, including ourselves. That is obvious at first blink. But I’ve long had the sense that there is more, not something that covers over or bypasses suffering, but something else that is just as real, just as potent, just as awake. Many of you know that the root of compassion, is to suffer with, to endure passion including unpleasant emotions and sensations with. But I think it’s actually an art to live with compassion without tiring ourselves out, or adding to our own suffering through fatigue.

 

There is a lot that is overwhelming both in our personal lives and in the wider world. It can often do the exact opposite by inundating ourselves with images and sounds, unless we recall this critical piece of information: we are participants in it, truly participants. We are not bystanders looking at a world that is burning. And we are not neutral bystanders of our own lives, shining a light of awareness with complete neutrality at our life. By noticing our life, noticing when we wake up that we’re alive, we have the chance to be participants in it. We no longer become only victims. We no longer believe that life is only something that happens to us, and the way that we feel about what happens to us is predetermined and obvious. We notice the nuance of it. We notice that our responses to our life and to the world are often predetermined and obvious, they follow clear patterns, but following a habit is not the same thing as choosing to engage with our life, and with the world. Because choosing to engage with our life is much like  going on a journey without knowing for certain where we’re going.

 

Much of the pain in the world, and the pain of our life, is the feeling of certainty, the idea that we know what will happen. Have you noticed that those who predict the worst are considered realists? We believe that is what it means to be real. We don’t need to wake up to our life, because we already know where this is headed, and it’s not good. And I’m not saying that those predictions are wrong. They may very well be right. A sane person would predict that we are all going to die at some point, and for some of us, sooner than we would hope. In many ways that is a reasonable prediction, even though it’s a tough one. But it’s the second assumption that too often goes with a prediction like that I’ve learned to question. The assumption that it is set in stone how we’re going to experience that, how we’re going to feel about it, and what those feelings will mean for our life. That truly is open and unknown. And by noticing we’re alive in simple ways, we touch that place of openness, we touch the possibility of the unknown.

And that place of openness doesn’t necessarily change what happens: it doesn’t change the plight of refugees, it doesn’t reverse a cancer diagnosis. But it does something which I fear is under great threat in the times we’re living in: it restores curiosity. What is it like to live knowing we’ll die? What is it like to live alongside others who are full of gratitude and full of grief? What is it like to be ourselves on this day, at our current age, in our current circumstances? The beautiful thing is no one can truly answer any of those questions for you. But you can if you can wake up before it’s too late. And you can find an answer to that in a blink, being curious about what it means to be you, to be alive. And if you don’t like the answer, keep blinking and stay curious. The answer is never set in stone.

Topics: Curiosity