I wonder, sometimes, at what point one really, deeply appreciates one’s life. Is this the gift of the visions which commonly accompany death?
I often feel that I don’t appreciate my life enough. It’s true that, having reached mid-life, I have plenty of challenges: financial, health, the looming global societal catastrophe, and the usual work dealing with the shadows and traumas cast by the decisions I made during the first half of my life.
Yet much of my life is amazing. I don’t want to run through a list here for fear of sounding like I’m bragging or inviting a “how amazing is my life competition” among readers, but the truth is that I am doing, have experienced, or have accomplished, many things that my younger self, if I could send him a letter, would be staggered and joyed by.
This morning I went for a walk beside the ocean in a beautiful city I loved and never thought I would live in, received a text from my coparent telling me of how much she thinks our son is flourishing right now, engaged in a spiritual practice/experiment which grows out of the last thirty years of learning the philosophies and spiritual practices of many different traditions, and then headed here to write this substack, which currently has about 600 subscribers. Today I won’t work on the book I’m contracted to edit, but later today I will go into the clinic to practice esoteric styles of Chinese medicine. I feel oddly dulled to how cool the whole experience really is despite whatever stresses and challenges I (and we) may face.
The title of this article comes from the title of a book by the Japanese Zen teacher Taizan Maezumi (1931–1995), who was a teacher of friends of mine. Maezumi Roshi was a person of genius, pathos, struggle and failure. By many accounts he was an incredible Zen teacher, a charismatic, creative personality and community leader and a master artist of Japanese calligraphy (and gardening). Yet he also struggled with addiction to alcohol and sex and had inappropriate affairs with female students. After the truth of his behaviour was aired publicly and confronted by his community he met with student after student, listening to the impact it had on them. I am told that he did not defend himself, but simply listened and acknowledged the truth of his behaviour and its impact, day after day1.
So I think of old Maezumi when I hear that phrase in my head, “appreciate your life.” I am willing to bet he did, even amidst his failure and pain.
I often think that this lack of appreciation is actually one of the greatest problems in our lives. The universe itself, and our mere existence in it, is already a staggering, incomprehensible fact which should excite stunned wonder whenever we contemplate it.
Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), who I consider one of the greatest Jewish thinkers (and Rabbis2) of all time, wrote, “Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me. Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.” In this quote Heschel is of course siding with Plato and Aristotle, who both identified wonder as the beginning of philosophy, against Descartes, who grounded it in doubt.
“As civilization advances,” Heschel also wrote, “the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”
We will not perish for a want of information, but only for want of appreciation. I think this is true. How much personal misery would be washed away by a degree of appreciation actually commensurate with the nature of reality? How much injustice and oppression would be negated before it was born if communities and political leaders appreciated the gifts the cosmos has already placed in their pockets instead of wanting to pilfer the coffers of others?
Do how do we appreciate our lives? Well, fundamentally I think we will all have to find our own ways to this, dear reader. Speaking for myself what I find most useful is just to take a moment to try to look around me with the eyes of a child, to see things afresh, like I had never seen them before. If you really do this you will find that you exist in a bizarre, almost shocking realm of inconceivable and surprising wonder. Even a Starbucks of the kind I am sitting in right now shows itself to be a realm of amazing wonder. How ever did such a complex, magical thing come to be born of the naked cosmos of energies and mysterious beings as a Starbucks?
A friend of a friend, John Troy, once posted a video where he wondered aloud why anyone needed to pursue special spiritual states when the reality we are all already experiencing is so incredible. I resonate with this, though personally I see this as a both/and not an either/or and don’t see wondering at the world before me as a reason not to engage in exploring inner space and altered states of consciousness. In any case, he makes an important point worth pondering nonetheless.
A second useful exercise is to bring different versions of yourself into dialogue with each other. Consider how your self as a child might consider your life as it is now, or how your future self- on your death bed, for instance, or felled by one of the inevitable illnesses of aging, might relish the freedom and opportunities you have now. Considering what the various selves you have been or will be, past and future, would think of your life now, can bring a beneficial displacement of the hypnotic states we tend to live in and renewed appreciation for our life (or possibly a course correction, which is not a reason to avoid this exercise).
So in summary, I would suggest trying these two experiments, or doorways into appreciation, which I will call seeing with the eyes of a child and becoming unstuck in time3.
A traveller might “succumb to the heresy of believing one place actually closely resembles another. But this is not true. Each place is itself only, and nowhere repeated. Miss it and it’s gone,” wrote Barry Lopez in his essay Six Thousand Lessons. This is not just true of places, but of moments in time. Our moments may very in the intensity of their meaning for us, but they do not vary in their miraculousness, or their uniqueness. Every moment we experience will neve be repeated, nor will it be experienced by anyone else. This is perhaps the third doorway, that of the wonder of non-repetition.
Now I am going to sip some of the remarkable miracle called coffee.
My intention in recounting this is not to minimize his misconduct. Yet for those of us who smugly— and possibly mistakenly— think we would not do anything like that in his position, I wonder how many of us would be able to meet with all the people we’ve ever hurt and listen to their stories without defending ourselves in any way?
At a time when post-Holocaust American Jews were trying to quietly recover and attain middle class stability and respectability, Heschel marched with Martin Luther King Jr and opposed the Vietnam war, as well as teaching Hasidic mysticism. All of these were much to the horror of his Rabbinic contemporaries.
This is a nod to Kurt Vonnegut, please see Slaughterhouse-Five if you have not yet done so.
I always like what you write, Matthew. Perhaps you are a friend of my ultimate teacher, Robert Saltzman, also now on Substack.
Matt, you touch on some things that are worth noting. First and foremost, 'ask and it shall be given to you.' Hershel asked God for Wonder, and boy, did he get it. Second, present moment awareness. You can never truly appreciate the beauty and wonder of our world if you don't get out of your head and into the present moment. Meditate, it heals you in so many ways. Last, simplicity. Seeing through the eyes of a child is to see with innocence and simplicity. Combine that with present moment awareness and faith in God and you have a life overflowing with appreciation and gratitude. Well done.