Daddy photons and the pleasure of wondering 🙉🙉🙉
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Last Tuesday marked 22 years since my dad passed away. I woke up and light some incense to put on his altar. As I looked at his picture there, I wondered: “When this picture was taken, some light photons touched his body, reflected back and got captured on the camera screen and then printed out. Now, the photons from the light bulb behind me bounce at the picture, then hit my retina. The brain tells me instantly that’s my dad”.
Isn’t that amazing?
Somehow that understanding brought me into my body, this alive organism breathing in and out the bluish smoke of incense. The air felt uniquely intimate. It reminded me of a line in a David Whyte’s poem:
“To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surrounding”
Even if that picture is not my dad, it is someone who have touched me indirectly (or directly?) through a pattern of dancing photons. We are somehow all connected through a long chain of events. Something happened in the past can continue to affect us in the present and accompany us into the future. We just forget that truth about 99.9% of the time.
You wouldn’t call this a spiritual experience, would you? It was for me: a sense of wonder, a fascination with the unknown, especially the one right in front of my eyes.
The pleasure of wondering
Wondering like this can feel like an escape from the daily concerns, an avoidance from what matters. For me, it is more like entering a different world to discover something new. It is heading to the mountain to ask the master — the Unknown — and bringing back the gift for others.
Sometimes I wish I could write something more relevant and practical like How To Achieve 10x Your Result or something like that. Sometimes I ask in semi-sincerity: “Dear father who is in heaven, how on earth am I supposed to cherish the strange wiring of my mind and make it useful for those around me”? I hear nothing from him, and I assume silence from the sky means approval, so let me try to make a case for it anyway.
Wondering is a life skill that will save you when troubles really strike. It’s like meditation, you need it the most when you don’t have time for it. As an example, consider a faraway yet inevitable situation: death. If all of us are to die anyway, would you want to die only with fear “Nooo I don’t want to leave” or also with a sense of wonder “Wow, I wonder what happens on the other side?”
You don’t have to wait till end of life to see the benefit of this wondering practice though. Once you start doing it, the fixed lens through which you view the world — the good, the bad, the terrible — melt into an ever flickering kaleidoscope, bouncing those dancing photons into your eyes.
The world then becomes perhaps less certain but surely more interesting. You start to notice patterns in addition to things. With that, you can see the ordinary objects with new eyes, a skill you can package and sell to the innovation industry as “beginner’s mind” or Zen.
Strange you
With that kaleidoscope, you will view yourself differently too: who is this person, this paradoxically familiar and strange one under the skin? Once you embrace this new complexity about the self, life becomes increasingly more fun.
Remember children playing peak-a-boo? It’s like playing it with ourselves. One moment, this self is here. Next moment, it’s gone. The difference is that children play that game with amusement and delight. We adults play it with more tumultuous emotions like uncertainty, doubts and fear. These are not to be avoided but become part of a larger, more complex and worthwhile game. Letting go of what we know about ourselves is not easy though, which is why we need blessing like this.
“So free may you be about who you become” — John O’Donohue
Interesting enough, once you become less attached to a specific notion of yourself, you become attuned to a deeper place of meaning where you reach a dynamic equilibrium between chaos and order, to borrow the now trendy phrase.
From that place springs a sense of macro-presence in your own life as if you truly belong here. Yes, your strange self belongs in this strange world. You are this focused mission-driven changemaker AND you are that frivolous, trash-can-kicking vagabond.
Yes, we did kick trashcans. Maybe I’ll need to ritualize it to remind myself of how to live a meaningful life 🤣
A bit more serious though, if you can hold more and more the complexity of who you are, you are more ready to deal with the messy world. Think about the most challenging conversation with a loved one that you have been avoiding. Maybe with your conscience. If you can handle that, imagine how confident you will become in dealing with everything else?
Once you have come to the foundational place of Yes as Richard Rohr says, the stars start to align. Slowly but surely, as you seek out those who embrace your wondering with a similar level of curiosity, people will notice, help and even join you. With everyone’s support, you become more effective whenever mission-driven mode is on.
You hold dearly the belief that you have some unique task to accomplish in your life — your destiny. Then you let it go into the void of purposelessness, and with it also the worry that there is something wrong with the world unless you are out there to put it right. Then the process starts again, each time your ever growing level of ambition gets matched with equally deep contentment, both happily co-exist in the paradoxical you.
So far such plot has worked out for me, an ethnographically studied sample size of one. I hope it works with you too. Happy Spring!
ps: Then I imagined the encounter between the lucky sperm and welcoming egg.I’ll spare you the erotic details of my imagination 😋 Just remember that whatever your gender identity is, there was a sperm and an egg. Isn’t that WILD?
pps: wants more soulful conversation like this? Chat with me here.
Quotes
As per requested, the quote section is back, and this week I want to share some poetic reframing by David Whyte to those exhausted. Contemplating on good quotes is like massaging your tensed up existence.
REST
"Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right". (emphasis mine)
I'd love to be joyous, smooth and relaxed. But I love to do something for the world, which oftentimes will bring me into contact with painful realities. Learning to truly rest is to live with that paradox.
Sharing is sprouting.
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