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.