Taking Simple Pleasures

We are all of us subjects of life. We are forced to take in the sheer fact that we breathe, experience and feel. Some of the more somber religions say that this existence is painful. I'm not of that mind.
I'm not a person with violently shifting moods. My moods are icebergs. They bob about on a sea of wonder - but are slow to turn and return. My mind has mostly left me alone to do my thinking in piece - and so it has done.

When I write this, it is to give some background to that question which life begs of us; How should we meet our experience? Life, filled with more small happenings than big ones, yet seem to be defined by the latter. Everyday experience is by very definition mundane. The selfsame bread that stirred our taste buds yesterday bores us today. The air outside our door is as stale as the bread - doubly so on the way back when the air is thick with smog. And somehow we manage to keep to this routine throughout weeks and months.

A large part of this I take to be forgetfulness - a blessed thing. But the part of us that does not forget will perish or blossom on the back of these experiences. Remember that which you once knew - but have chosen to forget. That the world, such as it is, appears firstly for you, and not for anyone else. Other minds are out there, but they do not shear your experience.

The taste of bread, the smell of air and a thousand other small events are happening, not only out there, but in your head. You are meeting these trivial experiences as yourself. You can remember that when you were young these experiences were exiting to you. Fresh bread and the wind in your face.

It wasn't the bread or the wind that changed  - it was you.

There is an asceticism about this frame of mind - or if you will a zen- ness. We move through the world as if it was a series of fleeting moments; wind and taste - translucent and ephemeral. These empty experiences which you have learned to quietly loathe are hardly real at all. And that emptyness, which fills you, is an emptiness and loathing of yourself. It is not the bread that is stale.

To truly meet your experiences is to elevate them from the trivilal, the mundane and the ordinary into the essensial, the primary and the vivid. When the small becomes the object of focus for something as big as the mind - these things are magnified, and their beauty steps into the light of day. Have you noticed the softness of water? Have you noticed the sweet aftertaste of bread? Have you felt the blueness of winter air?

By elevating our everyday experiences, we elevate ourselves. And by endowing our minds with mindedness, we make the world more beautiful.