Life is Short, Stop Acting Adultish

Being stared at by a baby is one of the most fortunate things that can happen to you.

Have you had this experience? A child on public transit gazes at you unblinkingly. It is fearless. It has never seen a You before, so there is a lot to take in. The clarity of a stare so straightforward is disarming.

Children get absorbed in the simple act of looking because they are actually seeing. Whereas an adult will take in your appearance and immediately run down a subconscious checklist of comparisons and judgments, the child is without grounds to make snap assumptions. It looks at you openly because it is innocent. It looks at you out of sheer curiosity.

Understatement of the century: It would be nice if everyone made it a practice to view each other like children.

I keep a photograph of myself at age 4 on my wall as a reminder. I see child-me, wired with inquiry and honesty, and consider whether or not I am doing that dear little person any justice.

I ask myself: Have I allowed my world to get smaller even as I’ve grown bigger?

The way children see is what Zen master Shunryu Suzuki calls beginner’s mind: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Purity (or goodness, or emptiness, however you want to talk about it) is natural. We were all children once.

In other words, concepts like shame were taught to us. This neurotic way we have of viewing each other - going back and forth between criticizing others and feeling sorry for ourselves - is not inherent.

Which also means that this nagging impulse to acquire more, to achieve more, to prove something, to get some ground under our feet, is a cosmic joke. It's like at some point during adolescence, they gave us blinders to wear for the race to the grave. That's not to say there's no point to achievement. That's not to say we shouldn't bother trying to live well.

But there is a natural clarity under all the insanity, and I'm disturbed by how few people return to it as a space where they can ask themselves what this "living well" even means. Imagine the wisdom that would arise if we were to combine our adult intelligence with a child's clarity of perception!

Meditation helps us come back to that openness. We can live more fully if we take up the discipline of re-learning the open-eyed, open-hearted way we were as kids. If we take the time to really pay attention to everything that's happening around us, I think we'll find ourselves fascinated again.

There was a time I ate a peach after a good long sit, and it was so good it brought tears to my eyes! This is pure joy: appreciating what is right here.

Living fully does not mean checking items off a Bucket List so that we can smile on our deathbed at the fact that we base-jumped El Capitan, dyed our hair purple, made six figures, or drove a loud motorcycle.

Living fully means experiencing our life for what it is, and not what we think it ought to be. It asks us to put aside the ego we've spent so much time growing. It asks us to remember that we are going to die, so the sooner we can stop deluding ourselves, running from one distraction to the next, the better.

Find some pictures of yourself as a child. Gently consider whether or not you have donned some tunnel vision over the years. Can you remember what it was like to be a blank canvas?

That's a good start. More on this another time.

How to Live Forever

My great-grandfather’s funeral last week was overflowing; my cousins and I had to stand in the aisles. The room was a-buzz as both young and old got up to share stories. We laughed and cried without discretion. We cajoled one another, embraced, and hollered our support. It was the best funeral I’ve ever been to, because it wasn’t a sermon so much as an untempered dialogue. It made me remember that the root of both grief and joy is love. In that crowd it was tangible.

Great Grampy’s legacy is assured because he asserted his love with countless kind gestures. When my aunt announced that she wanted to be a mechanic as a child, he gave her a set of tools and asked her to help him fix his truck. When I was little, he would point to a picture of me and ask “Do you know who that girl is? I love her!” Every time any of us visited he would stand us in the same spot in the kitchen and snap a Polaroid. I imagine he had stacks of Polaroids somewhere that you could use like flipbooks to watch us grow.

The stories extend backwards and forwards in time. The oldest grew in light of his loving presence, and pass that love down the line to the youngest. I wonder – who taught Great Grampy to love? And who taught those people to love? And those people? How much cumulative loving intention throughout the generations of people resulted in a man so radiant with it?

The effort of understanding it is like seeing a ripple on the edge of a lake and trying to return to the point where a hand touched the water. Love - that sublime energy that enlivens us with joy and sorrow - carries humankind through the ages, like a disease without antidote. One sincere gesture lifetimes ago can still be felt among the living, and the gestures are countless. This is our lineage: our actions have vaster consequences than we can see.

I feel the gravity of my heart. We express ourselves spatially and temporally because we’re bound by matter, these bodies that wither and pass. But the currents that run through us are beyond time and space. Our intentions radiate into the lives of the people we encounter, triggering chain reactions beyond our comprehension. What kind of ripples are you sending down the line? Are you fully open to being a conduit for the love you receive?

Walt Whitman writes:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

The night before the funeral I dreamed he was laid out at my grandparents’ house. The rest of my family was sad and frantically busy. I watched them leave the room as they rushed off to get ready for the funeral, and when I turned back to look at him, he was sitting up, smiling at me.

His blue eyes shone. I said, “I thought you were gone.” He shrugged and said, “But I’m right here!” We laughed, and I said, “You’re going to freak everyone out if you are awake like this at your funeral.” The idea cracked us up. I looked to the door to see everyone rushing back into the room, and when I turned back, Grampy was laying down with his eyes closed again. He had the slightest grin on his face, as though he were keeping a beautiful secret. That's when I woke up.

The Prophet: On Wearing Makeup

And Almitra said, "Speak to us of wearing makeup." And he leaned towards the women, and looked lovingly upon their upturned faces.

"Some of you paint your faces, and say you would not leave the house without the concealment of makeup. Others of you never augment your natural beauty, and say you need not hide or lie behind such a false facade.

"I say unto both, be not ashamed of your radiance, which is neither diminished nor augmented by the costume of makeup.

"If you would use makeup, apply it in celebration of your beauty, which is God's beauty. When you make a caricature of perfect health, you celebrate the euphoria of the human form.

"Your blush is but an imitation of the flushed cheeks of lively exertion. Your mascara but serves as a way-sign to the radiance of your eyes, those sacred portals where the heart greets the world.

"Be not self-conscious about your urge to adorn your features, but know also that the glory of your form does not subsist in adornment. Let the application of paints be a ceremony of gratitude for what you have, for the poor in spirit will not find themselves made beautiful by makeup.

"Look upon yourself as a mother looks upon her peacefully sleeping child, knowing the true meaning of beauty with gratitude and tenderness. Without this reverence for oneself as spirit born in flesh, one may as well decorate a corpse."


(My amendment to The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran)