“Being here is so much.”

Rilke

Our minds are worlds in themselves, and with our minds we take what is and project it into our own unique views of reality. No two people see the world the same way. It’s remarkable that we have this inner life and yet still connect with and understand the views of others.

Yet just as astounding, the Irish poet John O’Donohue writes in his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (and which I forward in this journal entry, his ideas not mine), is how we can make our worlds so familiar and routine that we forget how wonderous it is to be here at all. No mystery. No strangeness. Just the everyday rigmarole. Haven’t each of us gone through days, even weeks, with time blurring past and no significant memories standing out? We live day to day and notice nothing, because nothing seems to be worthy of notice.

More than ever before, we’re sinking into automatic living, going through life on our little tracks of routine and normalcy as we make our livings. Work, commute, friends, family, leisure, weekends, holidays, new year, repeat. And we don’t even notice! We think that this is what life is, and the wheels keep on turning… until tragedy strikes.

Life is normal and routine and automatic until it’s not. When things go wrong, we’re suddenly thrown off these familiar maps, and we see the world with different eyes, the numbing familiarity we took for granted a veil that falls away when life’s wind blows.

It was all a dream. It never existed beyond the fragile construction we made in our own heads.

Suddenly, we see life for what it is. Fleeting. Fragile. Fearful. Yet wonderful.

How often do we hear of people who made dramatic shifts after a near-death experience, or the loss of someone they loved? How many times have you been pulled out of the daze of so-called normal life and into the vividness of real life? Each of such moments stands out in my memory, be it the deaths of my grandparents, two of which I witnessed, or all the emergencies I’ve seen in my profession. These are stark moments that remain vivid whilst so much else fades into the indistinct soup of everyday memory. In the best of times and the worst, everything looked different, and for better and for worse, I felt more alive. Yes, there was pain, but also tremendous meaning and even beauty… yes, there is beauty, even in sadness. There’s a thereness to everything when we are truly present and aware.

It’s a tragic thing that most people need to suffer a tremendous loss before seeing clearly the wondrous gift of our lives and the world. If only we could live with this state of awareness and wisdom before we kneel at the grave of loss, we might notice the beauty that’s everywhere. If we can free ourselves from this robotic inertia, with all its repetition and predictability, how much different would we see the world? How much better would life be?

Beauty, as O’Donohue eloquently puts it, is the secret sound of the deepest thereness of things. But to see it, we need to look past all the superfluous things that render us blind, and be wherever we are, truly be there.

Because being here, wherever here is, is so much indeed.