Awake, Do, Alight

Photo by Will van Wingerden via Unsplash

What do we mean when we speak of the everyday?  Much could be talked about in these regards.  In general we may think of common and habitual activities or occurrences that arise from day to day.  These may include showering, opening and closing the front door, having a meal, using a tissue, using the restroom and so on and so forth.  It could be assessed even further as being activities like driving a car, doing some grocery shopping, making love, mowing the lawn, talking with a friend, going to a movie and so forth.  The examples are endless and yet as we go further with each one we begin to see that a continuum of sorts begins to emerge as to what constitutes an everyday occurrence.  What is everyday for one person may not be everyday for another but that is all the more why anything in a sense has the potential to be everyday in that one person could make whatever they like be their everyday depending on the direction they wish to take their life.  

Of course there are limitations for some folks, such as a paraplegic who may not be able to go for a walk, however this is not really what we mean by this.  There is always a more intimate sense of the infinite, one that is personal to us and our circumstances.  Factors may change from person to person but each person has their own unique infinity to embody and sort through.  As such then I am brought back to this idea of meditation again and how it can be integrated into one’s daily life, throughout the day, where meditation is very much an actual doing of everyday life.  Also, I am interested in how, if perhaps beneath meditation or inside of it there is art and that our life itself is art, intimately, on a  grand scale and at all points and times in-between.  What could that mean for us as we think of our lives and enact our lives through co-creation? 

I come back to this term co-creation frequently not so much as a manifest destiny assessment but rather as a more subtle and supple form of making up one’s life, as the awareness and integrated nature of that act of making up transforms.  It is a very subtle kind of magic.  And I think that quite possibly we, ourselves, are the finest aspects of art or rather we are to come to know ourselves as being equal to, on par excellence with all of creation, no grander or smaller than any given phenomenon or occurrence.  I say occurrence so often because I see what arises in our lives as not being within our power alone but done in tandem with that which stretches out further than our arm’s reach, perhaps even further than our mind’s reach (though imagination may have us connected to infinity itself).  

It seems more and more in this way that the miraculous is built up from good habits within the mundane.  Of course it is true that some things just happen out of the blue but in line with the saying that luck favors the prepared person I see a way to prime ourselves with knowledge and more importantly intention through attitude that can make us ready to receive the bounty of life in all its wonder.  I am coming back to some of my same core habits in these regards: meditation, mindful eating, proper rest, just the basics really.  But the basics are so infinitely important.  They keep us in tune.  They keep us prepared to catch the ball so to speak.  It is that old saying about how the ship will never show if you don’t make it to the dock.  Our eyes open in the morning but when do we truly awake?  That is when intentionality comes into play and we can cultivate that through an artistic conception of ourselves along with an integrated practice of meditation among other considerations.