The Miracle in the Everyday
Our world is beautiful. How would our lives change if we saw that?
Author’s note: this is a republished piece; it originally appeared on my friend Alexandra Hudson’s excellent newsletter Civic Renaissance (The Miracle in the Everyday). I very rarely republish pieces to Heal the West, but this one felt important.
I wrote this post as Lexi was preparing to give birth to what I have no doubt will be a beautiful baby boy. As she took time off for maternity leave, I couldn’t help but reflect on the miracles we experience—and sometimes overlook—in our everyday lives.
Isn't it miraculous that humans can literally create life? Women can nurture that life and give birth to it. When it comes out, that brand new life has a soul all its own—a unique personality, a spirit, an essence that was knit together in its mother's womb. I think we sometimes forget how incredible that is.
But it's not just new life. In Life Without Lack, theologian Dallas Willard talks about how humans are innately creative. We can take things and combine them into new things. We can take so many powders (flour and sugar and cinnamon and baking powder) and combine them into delicious muffins. We can start with a blank page in a company meeting, and by the end of the meeting—as we all bounce ideas off of each other in a creative and generative process—we can have a strategic plan for our company's next year. That is remarkable.
I think food is another example of the miracle of everyday life. For years, I saw food as just a means to an end. I was a busy man, and food was just my way of replenishing necessary calories so that I could keep working. But lately, I've started to slow down and really taste my food. It is miraculous. The burst of succulent flavor of a blueberry, the magical sweetness of chocolate, the crisp combination of fresh lettuce and parmesan cheese. Our world is beautiful.
Of course, our world can also be painful. I spent my 20s dealing with a toxic cocktail of abuse, addiction, and suicidal depression. I'm not here to paint a bunnies-and-rainbows picture of a paradisiacal world in which we all hold hands and sing kumbaya. Sometimes life is hard. But even in the hard times, there is beauty. There is the miracle of the ordinary—from the jagged shape of a single piece of gravel, to the smooth acceleration of a car that takes us far faster than most animals can run—if we only slow down enough to appreciate it.
I think that noticing the miracles in the everyday can help us to restore civility, both in our civitas and in our own life. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote: “Two things fill the mind with ever-new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” In "Why the Sublime Can Heal Our Society and Ourselves," Lexi expands on this point in a beautiful way.
"This sentiment echoes an idea articulated by 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal: man is a finite being between two infinities.
"The two infinities we straddle are those above us and those within us—the macroscopic universe around us and the microscopic universe within us—neither of which we have even begun to understand. Encountering the sublime is more than just encountering something pretty; it’s a powerful displacement of our sense of self that helps put into perspective the petty things in life that wear us down."
Connecting to these two infinities can reduce the grip on us of what theologian Jamie Winship calls our "false self." What is our false self? For Winship, it's our "fear, guilt, and shame." When I'm writing about the false self, I usually add anger to its list of attributes. None of these four emotions is always bad—for example, we feel righteous anger against abusers. But I think in general, these emotions hurt us far more often than they help us. In our modern society, in which so many of us suffer from anxiety and frustration, they can trap us like Shelob's web in The Two Towers: binding us in sticky spiderwebs that feel impossible to slice through and escape from.
As I wrote for Heal the West:
"I think our False Selves can be like these spiderwebs. They can trap and constrain us. The fear and the anger, the guilt and the shame that we experience can hide our light and stop us from doing what we know is right. Even worse, they can sometimes take the wheel and push us into lashing out at other people or into hating ourselves."
When we're trapped in our false selves, it's hard to be civil. When fear has us in its grip, we can perceive threats in innocuous statements from the people we care about, and lash out in what we feel is a proportional response. When we're mad at our life and the people in it, that anger can sometimes boil over onto people who don't deserve it. Even when our anger boils over onto the person who we think caused it, we can often end up wounding them and widening—rather than healing—the rift between us. When we feel guilty and ashamed, we can withdraw from everyday life and from the people who love us, hurting them by accident with our absence. Of course, little of this is intentional on our part.
But as we learn to focus on the two infinities that Kant and Pascal described, as we start to appreciate the endless miracles in our everyday lives, we can work to free ourselves from the grip of the "false self." We can learn to observe these emotions rather than act on them. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation, "Studies on Buddhist monks suggest that their intense meditation practices alter their brains in lasting ways, decreasing activation in brain areas related to fear and negative emotionality."
As we connect more with the miracle of everyday life, we feel more love, joy, peace, and connection. These sensations—so much deeper than surface-level emotions—fill us and sustain us. They transform us from the inside out, and then they overflow out of us. They can turn us into what Lexi calls "magnanimous souls" who produce a "mellifluous echo" that reverberates through everyone they meet. Here's how Lexi describes these souls:
"Such people have tremendous strength of character and raw determination, and act as their family’s social glue and foundation. Through their lifestyle, their cumulative decisions, they influence those around them—and the generations after them—for the better. These magnanimous souls, people of great personal strength and benevolence, live out a beautiful song that produces a mellifluous echo in successive generations. They initiate a virtuous cycle that begins by building into the lives of those they meet, who in turn build into the lives of [others]."
So how can we connect to the miraculous in our day-to-day lives? There are many ways, but in this post I'll focus on two.
First, we can slow down. Our society is obsessed with busyness. Most of us multitask on our phones. If we have to wait for a few minutes for a friend to show up, a lot of us will scroll social media or check emails; either out of a desire to distract ourselves, or to get some more work done.
But what if we let go of the need to always be on—either distracted or working? What if we went back to eating meals slowly, to savoring every delicious bite and letting the meal stretch out, instead of eating as quickly as possible? What if we put our phones away so that, whatever we were doing, we could do it with our full presence? What if when we found ourselves waiting for someone to show up, we chose to savor the opportunity to look around and see the miracles in the world around us?
One way to start slowing down is to take awe walks. Awe walks are an idea coined by Haidt, in which we walk slowly through the world without our phones. We simply observe, and let our awe at the world wash over us. Awe walks can be powerful. As one of Haidt's students described her walk:
"It felt as if the experience of beauty and awe made me more generous and drawn into the present. The petty concerns of the past suddenly felt dull, and to worry about the future felt unnecessary because of how secure and calm I felt now. It was like I was experiencing a stretch of time and saying to myself and my anxiety that 'everything will be OK.' There was also a swarming feeling of happiness and simply wanting to connect with and talk to people."
Another way to tap into the miracle in our everyday lives is to meditate. For those of us who believe in God, meditation can be a powerful way to let go of the distractions of the world so that we can commune with our creator. But the benefits of meditation are not limited to theists. Meditation can help us to connect to the sublime above us as well as the sublime inside of us (what Indian spiritual guru Prem Rawat calls "the value and the preciousness of [our] existence").
The sheer beauty of the world around us can stagger us and humble us. It can help us to tap into a deep sense of love, joy, peace, and connection; which can transform not only our own lives but also the lives of those around us. All we have to do is learn to see it.
Heal the West is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or becoming a founding member. Your support is greatly appreciated.