Renegade Yogi

The ten-cent guide to a life worth living

What is worth seeking out in life? How do we decide what to do, how to live?

These are the questions I am asking myself. I’ve done a little research, and thanks to Robert Bellah, I think I have a pretty good answer.

Now, first let me start by saying that I don’t believe in any sort of absolute good and bad. That’s something that I don’t think bears out in the long run. Different people value different things.

However, through our own organisms, we do judge things as good and bad. And some things we judge as inherently good. That is, they are not good as a means to an end. They are ends in themselves. They differ for each person. But it is the very sense of good that is the value of life. The more you pay attention to those moments, the more value you extract and add to them.

A dinner with friends. A beautiful mountain vista. A kiss with the person you love.

These are all things that are good in themselves (to me) and they are ends in themselves. They are what make your life worthwhile.

And these are far easier to achieve than you might think. They don’t have to be expensive. You can pack these experiences in really densely. There’s plenty of room in every second to enjoy they wonder and amazement that is your beautiful life. What’s even more astonishing to me is that your everyday experience contains just as much potential for joy as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. You only need to tune in and listen to your experience.

That’s something that I think meditation gives you. We walk around with our heads crowded with thoughts, or we distract ourselves from our thoughts with TV, radio, web surfing. But there is beauty all around us every moment, if we could just stop and pay attention. Meditation is the practice of paying attention.

Love is attention. When you pay attention to something, you can’t help but see the beauty and strangeness of it. Even the things you are used to. If you are paying real attention to it, really seeing through your habitual judgments, that thing comes alive in a way that makes it hyperreal.

The point of life is to maximize those moments. The moments of pure beauty and bliss. There are two ways you can go about maximizing those moments. One, through trial and error to discover the pattern of those moments and trying really hard to find new moments that are so special, no matter how distracted you are, you are blown away by their magnificence. Two, you clear out the clutter of your mind and experience each passing moment as if it were a raindrop reflecting a million rainbows as it falls to the ground.

I suppose there is a third option, which is to do both. That means meditating, learning to focus your mind, and at the same time doing good deeds and seeking the adventures that only add to the beauty you experience.

I’m going to make a list of ten things that are good in themselves and add value to life. I invite you to do the same, as a sort of exercise.

• A partly cloudy sunset
• A fresh ocean breeze
• The feel of laundry fresh out of the dryer
• Feeding a hungry person
• Crying over a friend’s misfortune
• A kiss on the cheek from a beautiful stranger
• Righting a wrong
• Meeting a kindred spirit
• A heartfelt love letter
• Stopping an injustice

These are ten things that are good in themselves. That is what I want to do: maximize these moments in my life.

Because that’s what I think life is about. You’re going to have everyday moments, like washing the dishes or sweeping the floor. So you might as well learn to appreciate them. You might as well develop a sense of wonder about them. Those moments, if we’re not trying to get them over with, if we are really present with them, they are the moments that can really knock your socks off.