Of Trash Cans And Babies' Eyes

From Awake in the Heartland, The Ecstasy of What Is by Joan Tolifson:

One day at the post office in Oakland, I saw a little girl, who was maybe four or five years old, in line with her mother. The little girl was totally alive, looking at everything with amazement. She ran to the wastebasket in the corner and gazed down into it as if into a sea of jewels. She was ecstatic. The mother kept pulling the girl back, telling her to stop this and stop that. Every other word the mother said was “stop” or “don’t.”

Finally they are up at the window, and at the next window there is another mother who has a little baby in a basket sitting on the floor beside her. The first little girl stands beside the basket, and the baby and the girl gaze unabashedly into one another’s eyes with total absorption. The mother of the little girl again pulls her back. As they leave, the little girl waves goodbye to the baby as if to her dearest friend.

It was such a clear display of the unobstructed love, wonder, and awareness that is there, and the process of human socialization which trains us to pull back from this aliveness, to stop looking, to stop being ecstatic, to close down. We learn to shut down and to live more and more in a mental world of ideas, so that by the time we are adults, we are uncomfortable looking for too long into a stranger’s eyes. And it would never occur to us to run up to a wastebasket and actually see what’s inside it as something we’d never seen before, with curiosity and interest. Because by the time we're adults, we think we know what's in there. We’ve got a word for it. It’s garbage. We don’t see it any more. And we don’t see one another, or the love between us, because we’re afraid of it. We’ve learned that a person who would look with wonder into a public wastebasket, or too long into a stranger’s eye, is a crazy person, a mad person. We’re afraid to be in love, except in the allowable, relatively safe confines of romantic relationships, or perhaps in rare moments of communion with babies and very young children. For the most part, we’re cool, detached, afraid of the natural ecstasy of being.

Our lives feel empty. We long for the spontaneity, joy, and wonder that we seem to have lost. We take workshops and consume mind-altering substances to regain it. We undertake rigorous meditation practices and throw ourselves at the feet of exotic gurus. We run up enormous visa bills, looking for what is simplest and most ordinary, for what is already here.

When we finally "get it", we get nothing at all. We have not arrived at some fascinating foreign place. We're exactly where we always have been - right here. Here is all there is. But when we're looking for something else, we don't see how extraordinary here actually is. We're preoccupied.

Here and now is alive. It's the only thing that actually is.

Here's to coming back to the curious, open people we truly are, beneath the ideas of social correctness. Here's to authenticity. At this point in time, how can we afford to "pull back from this aliveness, to stop looking, to stop being ecstatic, to close down"?

As Nick says, "it's time to celebrate and do a Snoopy dance"!

(That's me before I learned that it's not OK to look in public trash cans.)