Live life: like for the first time

One of the problems with acquiring things, whether it is the latest car or a newfound view, is that they only appear unfamiliar for a short time.

Soon we become accustomed to them. An antidote to this is to try and see the same old things with new eyes, everyday. And for that matter, taste, touch, hear and smell things with a new tongue, fingers, ears and nose.

With some practice you too could be like Alexis Zorba, better known as Zorba the Greek.

‘Like the child, he sees everything for the first time. He is forever astonished and wonders why and wherefore. Everything seems miraculous to him, and each morning when he opens his eyes he sees trees, sea, stones and birds, and is amazed.’

A good way to start seeing things for the first time is to be grateful for actually being alive in the first place. Being alive is an incredible opportunity. I like this remark from the Canadian poet, novelist and playwright, Alden Nowlan, who said (before he died in 1983):

‘Many, many times since I was a very small child I’ve stopped for a moment and thought to myself how very strange it is to be alive, that recurrent feeling of naked wonder.’

The fact that you are alive is remarkable in itself, especially when you take into account the conditions needed on earth to support life in the first place, the fact that every one of your ancestors going back to the first single-celled organisms survived to reproduce, that your mother and father met each other rather than someone else on this planet, and a particular sperm met a particular egg … well, the chances of you being alive are practically zero.

You’ve won the lottery! And, you should be grateful for it. You can smell flowers, make love, feel pain, grow, watch a bee, feel the sun on your skin. The last thing you should do is take your life for granted.

As the Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast says in the video clip A Good Day:

‘You think that this is another day in your life? It’s not just another day, it’s the one day that is given to you today. It’s given to you. It’s a gift. It’s the only gift that you have right now, and the only appropriate response is gratefulness. If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response, to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day of your life and the very last day, then you would have spent this day very well. Begin by opening your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open.’

We get used to our life, just as we get used to a new car.

As Steindl-Rast notes, we rarely take time to look at the sky, or the unique formation of clouds at any given moment, or the nuances of the weather, or to really open our eyes and hearts to other people, or be astonished by the gifts of civilization like drinkable water or electric light.

We can add other things to that list of course. We rarely stop to really appreciate what we are eating. We forget to smell. Our ears are blocked to the sounds around us. We are distracted by our babbling minds. We fail to touch. We glance at people in our family instead of really looking at them, as if for the first time, in wonder that they are beside us. We feed the dog absentmindedly, preoccupied with something less important. We wander to and fro like ghosts, rarely grateful, hardly ever really recognizing what we really have.

We are not observant. We are not alert. We are far away, often in a daydreaming state, unseeing, unfeeling, as if we are not really here at all.

Distraction is a fact of life of course. It’s part of what makes us human.

Life can be frenetic, but things that take us away from being in the moment and rush us through life are a menace. But there is an escape – take time out to just be. Don’t let thought interfere. Just remember to experience, as often as you can.

Some of us are better than this that others, but like so many things it all comes down to application. Either that, or we are faced by something that’s so striking that we just can’t ignore it.

I’m thinking here of a woman called Julie, who we met on a cliff-edge path beside the small Welsh coastal town of Tenby. She must have been in her sixties, and had lived in the same place all her life. Each morning, for more than forty years she had walked the short distance from the town to the cliff edge, carrying bags of food for the herring gulls and rock pigeons which gathered and swooped in their hundreds to meet her. As the gulls squealed, and our two young boys stroked the doves as they perched on a rough stone wall high above the glittering green sea, she told me something that struck me as wonderful.

‘Every day, without an exception, my heart misses a beat when I come up that hill and see the sea,’ she told me. ‘It’s always changing, and always so beautiful.’

To experience your heart missing a beat, to be excited by something you’ve seen hundreds of times, to be suddenly surprised when it puts in an appearance – if this happens, then you know you have spent this day very well.