Discovering What Matters

I’ve had some health issues this year that have put a major restriction on the kinds of food I can safely consume. Let me tell you, it hasn’t been easy.

As Joni Mitchell sings in Big Yellow Taxi, you don't know what you got 'til it's gone.

It’s certainly made me appreciate both the variety of alternate food options there are available and also just how much regular food is now unavailable to me, especially at restaurants.

Besides that, I’ve had a number of people close to me who have been suffering through their own different health crisis. I’m learning again how pain, suffering, and loss can bring a sharp focus to the good things in life—in a way little else can.

I went through a phase of watching a lot of Andrew Huberman interviews. While many of them had a major influence on my habits, one in particular still stands out.

Huberman interviews the magician and mentalist Asi Wind. The interview, while covering the topic of the performance magic, is about so much more: memory, meaningful experiences, human perception of reality, and interactive storytelling. In short, it’s about the magic of living.

There’s one line from Asi that especially stuck with me.

“That’s the way I live my life. Everything counts, every detail is important, nothing is too small.”

So often we (I’m speaking for myself here) miss all the little things that matter.

It takes an extreme focus, the kind that often comes as a result of painful experiences or rare magical moments, that get us to pay attention to what really matters, to all the beautiful little things.

While I don’t recommend it for everyone, that is one of the things I appreciated about the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. In the end, after living (and fighting) through all manner of alternate lives, the protagonist realizes that everything she truly needed, she already had, right there in her normal, mundane life of being a laundromat owner.

I wish there was an easy way for us to always see the beauty in the simple things, the little daily miracles around us. But it’s so easy for that perspective to gradually slip away like morning dew. We’re quickly caught up in the demands of just getting through another day.

However, this is one of the great benefits of submitting ourselves to art. It can get our attention in ways nothing else can.

It can give us eyes to see the world around us in ways we never could before. And when that happens, we find ourselves under a spell, not of trickery and deception but of real understanding.