📿 How Foolish to Forget How Rare All of This Is

Seeing the world through fresh eyes

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📍Before we get to today’s dispatch of The Laundry — a quick note to mark your calendars: as our offering to paid readers this month, Adreanna will be hosting an hour long meditation & writing shindig on Sunday, September 29th at 4pm EST. We’ll have a chat. We’ll share a prompt. We’ll practice. We’ll write. And then full circle back to a chat again. Make some tea, we’ll keep it cozy. Details + Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers next week.

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There is a story I’ve heard a few times recently. It’s the same story, yet it’s set in different periods and has different characters as a result. It struck a chord with me, so I’ll tell you my version of it:

A young boy, 12 years-old, sits on a beach in Cape Cod. He’s never been there but doesn’t see the difference between this beach and any other beach he’s ever been on. He had hoped that his friend, Jake, would be able to come with his family but he has to work all week. His parents are parents and he’s at an age where he’d rather be on his own than spend time with them. He sits there, bored, with a book he doesn’t want to read, looking at the ocean.

At that moment, a woman in her twenties shrieks in the distance. He turns around, only to see her smiling and shaking slightly as she walks from the parking lot onto the sand. Instinctively, he calls out: “Are you okay?” 

Previously unaware anyone had heard her, she sees the young boy and nods, then quickly turns back to look at the ocean. She says, in a flat matter-of-fact fashion, “I’m not from here. I’ve never seen the ocean before.” 

With that, the boy looks back at the ocean, seeing it as if through her eyes, for the first time, and falls in love with it, vowing not to take it for granted again.

Sophia Joan Short is an artist and poet. I most frequently see her work on Instagram and particularly enjoy a series where she takes simple moments, like having pizza with friends or dancing the night away or having time to read on the couch, and captions each scene with “How foolish to forget how rare all of this is.”

A simple statement, yet it hits my heart every time she adds to the series.

How foolish it is of us to forget the beautiful, simple moments that make up a life. To take them for granted. Only when they are gone and we lose touch with those friends or our nights staying out late dancing are done or we are lost to work or family and suddenly don’t have Sundays to read by ourselves do we realize these things we took for granted are a rarity. They arise in our life here and there and are meant to be appreciated and enjoyed, not in spite of but because they are fleeting.

There’s a moment in the movie Knocked Up where Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd’s characters are having a conversation in a playground, watching one of their daughters blow bubbles. 

“What’s so great about bubbles?” muses Rudd.

Rogen replies, “You can blow them. You can pop them. I get it.”

As long-time readers know, Rudd then drops the line that lives rent-free inside my head: “I wish I liked anything as much as my kid loves bubbles.”

The two acknowledge how sad that statement is before Rudd drives it home with, “Their smiling faces just point out your inability to enjoy anything.” 

As dramatic as these statements are, I’ve found truth in the first one; I wish I liked most things as much as my daughter delights in the simplest of pleasures. I buck against the second statement with all my might.

When Ruby saw a horse for the first time she lit up and had so much excitement in her small body that it had to be expressed through every extremity; her arms and legs began to vibrate with elation and she shook and kicked in delight. I tilted my head to the side, all of a sudden encouraged to see the horse with fresh eyes.

Instead of her smiling face pointing out my inability to enjoy anything, it invited me to look for what was exciting to her. Her discovery and love of simple things like bubbles encourages me to see them for the first time with her, discovering them anew through her eyes, not unlike the boy looking at the ocean he, moments ago, found completely mundane.

Because I’m a social beast, I have gotten curious about what my relationship with the world around me would look like if I applied those same fresh eyes to everyone I encountered. What if I was as interested in the people in the car driving ahead of me as my daughter was in horses?

2600 years ago the Buddha broke out three lenses through which we typically look at the world: passion, aggression and ignorance. These stem from basic reactions we have to everything around us: I like this thing, I don’t like this thing and I can probably ignore this thing. 

A place where my practice is feeling particularly juicy is the “I can probably ignore this thing” arena. Because I have so much on my plate, I find myself leaning more into times when I’m on my own, not responsible for another life other than my own, and letting those fleeting moments be ones when I can listen to what I want to listen to or think about what I want to think about…uninterrupted. I find these days that a quiet car ride on my own is a rarity.

And yet, even though I may be driving in my own car all by myself, I’m still in community with others. There’s a white jeep ahead of me that has a man, perhaps ten years older than myself, on a ride with a small dog who is enjoying having his head out the passenger seat window.

At first, this was a neutral situation for me. They were in their car, I was in mine, and so, I figured, I can probably ignore this thing. I was focused instead on what I wanted to listen to.

But neutral can shift on a dime. They began driving ten miles under the speed limit. And I had a haircut to get to.