Life-Love 88: Seeking instead of receiving

We are so powerfully inundated with messages through traditional and social media, that we sometimes can be swept away by the flow of words we stand in the middle of. Communication has become like air – something we breathe in and exhale, without noticing that it is keeping us alive. Just as air quality affects our health and well-being, so too does communication. It can shape what we think of who we are, what we want, and what we feel is important.

Life is not exclusively about image or receiving a packaged experience. A large part of life is discovering your point of view on things, your unique take on the world around you. This is tied intimately to noticing, isn’t it? When we are in the habit of receiving experience, we walk in straight lines, our eyes shielded like a blindered horse. We don’t look away from the beaten path. We uncritically accept superficial messages in politics, about the economy and accept relativist moral and ethical perspectives. This is a recipe for shallow, brittle existence.

When you break out of the receiving culture that we are conditioned into, and become a seeker, it is amazing what you can find. The world suddenly takes on hues and sounds that you simply weren’t perceiving before. You notice depth in other people’s feelings and nuance in political or economic proposition that you may have viewed as starkly black and white in the past. Receiving is self-centered. Seeking is other-centered.

I like to go for walks with my father in nature. A few summers ago, we went for a long walk and he did his usual thing of noticing all of the differences on the trail that he could remember from the times before that he had walked it. When I was a teenager, I decided that this was an annoying practice, and I closed the room of my mind that otherwise would have listened to him. I walked our walks with my mind turned inwards – lost in the dream of analysing and obsessing about my life: my relationships, my career prospects, my wants and needs. So the walks could really have been anywhere – that trail or another.

This time was different. I was in a contemplative, quiet mood, and paid attention as he commented and inventoried all of the fallen trees, gurgling brooks, whispering grasses, shrubs, deer rests, and changes in direction of the path. As we walked, I became acutely aware of the trees, how the sunlight filtered through the leaves and illuminated the ground in a evanescent, changing pattern of light and darkness. I felt the loamy earth underneath my shoes and every crackle of a breaking branch or twig as I trod upon it. I felt alive. I felt connected. As the walk continued, I felt my heart open and burden lift from my shoulders and my mind. My shoulders relaxed and my body felt lighter.

I didn’t talk much, and when we stopped in a clearing to sit on a stump in the pale yellow sunlight of a late spring afternoon, to eat our salami sandwiches and sip coffee from our thermos, I realised something. That this is what it means to be alive, to be at peace. This is what it means to seek experience rather than to experience it. My father’s inventory of the lush, hilly forest environment we walked through was a trail of breadcrumbs, each one anchoring an experience on the changing canvass of the natural world.

At one point, my father broke the silence, gruffly remarking on how he liked the sound of the wind rustling through the trees. That this was one of his favourite sounds. I asked him why. He thought for a long moment, as we chewed our sandwiches. His answer, when it finally came, was simple:

“Because it is the song of my childhood.”

And so these walks were a journey through memory, a journey reconnecting past and present. The story of a life remembered through small things noticed. Through attention and caring to detail. To understanding the present in the context of the past. A past that he remembered, because he took the time to seek out knowledge, experience and feeling – in a reasoned way – of the world around him.

I learned a life lesson that day that I wish I had learned many years before. And to think, it was there all along during those walks. All I had to do was seek it out by listening and noticing it when it fleetingly appeared right in front of me.

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