Here’s a disruptive thought: life is a spectacular thing, all the time.
Life is what we are given. Or, to put it differently, it’s what we have. It’s the brute, unchangeable fact that connects us all. It’s what we all absolutely have in common, the singular reality on which there is, and can be, no debate.
If we stop to consider that, pause, stop, look around, I think a moment of realisation and grounding follows. Draw your attention right in, right to the exact moment in time, and the obvious irrelevance of everything else becomes instantly apparent.
This might sound like New Age nonsense, but I’m not saying this off the back of any tradition or philosophy. Strip all of that away, forget about whys, hows and wheres, and the only truth that life affords us is that momentary sense of somethingness that’s captured in this way.
In order to have this experience, we must let go of a need to understand. Experience and understanding are, at this point of connection, at odds. The deeper you go into the experience, the further you move away from understanding it. Until, at the deepest place, understanding is not only impossible, but incoherent.
I use understanding here not in the rational thought sense. I mean it in every sense — what people refer to as spiritual, emotional, you name it. It’s all equally irrelevant. It’s all imposed on the stream of moments of life experience like a set of uncomfortable clothes. Necessary, as clothes are, but also completely artificial.
And this is the only truth we are actually capable of experiencing, beyond the Cartesian cogito. “I am here” is the externalisation of “I think, therefore I am”. It connects us with the world, with others, with everything else. If you can hold on to that sensation, even for a moment, it’s exhilarating and profound.
And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful in the same way as staring out into a fresh summer rain is beautiful. Or being stirred to tears by a passage in a book or the perfect phrase at just the right part of just the right song. Or the absolute certainty that comes with being in love. And it’s a constant.
It was Nietzsche who said that time is the source of suffering. If you cannot string together life’s moments into something that you can look back over, or forward to, you cannot feel suffering. Another way of putting this is that you cannot suffer in an instant.
This practice of finding the instant is life-altering. Once you’ve found it, you cannot unfind it. You will always remember it. And you can always go back to it.
Many people live in horrific states of poverty, abuse, ignorance or stupidity. However, it is often noted that these things in themselves don’t seem sufficient to cause people to be miserable. Likewise, misery is no stranger to the rich or the famous. I think it’s because this experience can be denied to no one.
A failure to be able to leave behind the world, the mind and day, is ultimately the failure to be able to see beauty and experience joy. This, ironically, is no less true of the thoughtful or the religious than it is of the boorish and the unbelievers. Whatever you take with you, down into the instant of life, is an obstacle.
I picture this descent as a kind of funnel. When you’re out at the edge, you can carry a lot with you — all your beliefs and opinions and deities and books. But as you descend into the funnel of the moment, there is less and less room for them, until at the point that is the instant, there is space only for nothing.
Unless you can learn to be in this state all of the time, you will continue to experience the trials and tribulations that life has in store. And, I still think, that isn’t a realistic goal anyway. We are physical beings; we are meant to experience physical sensations. We are also emotional beings; we are meant to experience emotions. And, it would appear, we are meant to use our bodies and our hearts to the full extent of what they are capable. Each of these dimensions brings with it its own intensity comparable to the one experienced in momentary experience.
This is why there is no morality, no direction and no answer, and never can be. That place of complete freedom is within us all.
The closer you can stick to life itself, the more times you can bring yourself down into this momentary place, leaving all the other junk behind, the more, I believe, you will find calm and purpose, and the greater resistance you will have to depression — which does seem to be the great and growing malady of our age.
Happiness, it turns out, is not in the contemplation or the meaning or the great purpose. It’s in a great absence of all of those things.
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