Reverb 10 Prompt (from Ali Edwards): Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).
That’s a tough one, Ali. My first impulse is to pick one of the “big” moments, like a funeral or a musical performance, but I have a strange tendency to slip into a somewhat disembodied, surreal state during big moments. I remember waking up the morning after my wedding and saying to my wife, “Did we just get married?”. I also find myself wanting to describe some big, dramatic moment because doing so would support the narrative of “I am so awesome! (Right?)”, which seems to sneak its way into too much of my writing, contributing to a vague sense of dishonesty and insecurity. So there’s an important distinction for me between the biggest moment and the most alive moment. Another obstacle to being unflinchingly honest about such things is that our most intensely alive moments could involve taboos, like drug intoxication, infidelity, reckless endangerment, or some other secret shame. I doubt a single Reverb 10er will describe a moment from the dark side, even if they tasted life there like never before.
As it happened, my most alive moment was neither a tale from the dark side nor a dramatic event. I described it here on my blog back in January:
As often happens, I popped awake at about 2am feeling restless and stiff. I fell into a meditative trance while loosening up my muscles with gentle, subtle micro-movements. After about twenty minutes of this, it happened. Again. A sense of clarity dawned on me so intensely that the last several months of waking life seemed like a coma by comparison. All the life issues I’ve been struggling with felt either completely resolved or else utterly unproblematic. I knew without a doubt what I needed to be doing with my life, how to refocus and realize my full potential and destiny.
Strangely, things were a bit more fuzzy by the time I woke up the following morning, and my life issues were mysteriously transformed back into their unresolved state. I hate when that happens. Reminds me of when my little sister would mess up my Rubik’s Cube. Still, every now and again I’m graced with these mystical openings of radiant clarity, and often they hit me after extended periods of tension and internal struggle. If fact, the last several of these little kensho awakenings have come in the middle of the night, after I’ve woken up tense and allowed myself to unwind with some body-centered meditation. It’s not something I can easily describe in terms of vivid sensory detail, as it’s more like an overall state of consciousness that makes everything seem clear, simple, and perfect as is.
I went into some more reflections and surrounding circumstances in my original blog post about it, but in keeping with Ali’s invitation, I’ll try to describe what I can remember of the sensory details. My muscles were very relaxed. I could feel the blood flowing through me and my breathing was deep and unrestricted. When I got up to play my guitar and read and think, my actions felt effortless, like my movements and thoughts were happening of their own accord, as opposed to my usual sense that everything is being powered by will or directed by conscious intentions. Sounds, specifically music from my voice and guitar, came to my ears unfiltered and clear, undistorted by thoughts, associations or expectations. Likewise, objects in the room appeared subtly clearer than usual, more there, more significant and beautiful in their stark simplicity. It’s tough to capture the sense in words. In some ways, it seemed like I was just experiencing my senses in a completely ordinary fashion, the extraordinary thing being the absence of my usual mental filtering mechanisms.
Well, there you have it. To anyone viewing the video footage (which hopefully doesn’t exist), it was just me squirming around in bed, then getting up to play my guitar and read for a little while. I suppose that’s all it was after all. The other nine of my top ten most alive moments were all in my living room playing my guitar and singing at the top of my lungs, but this zen moment just seemed a little more, I don’t know, … awesome. Right?
Hiya!
Thanks for commenting. I love the small moments of enlightenment as much as the big huge ones. My favourites come when walking along the waterfront to a meeting, iPod in, and there is nothing better in the world at that moment than that very moment. It IS awesome!