Yesterday, cycling through Paris, I pulled over to watch a tightrope walker - treading back and forth across a high wire that had been erected in front of some large, grand building.
A few people were standing around watching, some were filming on their phones. The scene was surrounded by tall green trees and there was a pure blue sky behind.
As the tightrope walker walked, the performance naturally provoked in me, thoughts about balance and how the high-wire is an apt metaphor for life and keeping to the path …
‘Bit obvious’ I considered, of my musings.
But then as I cycled away, I thought more about that self-criticism and realised that I was falling into a common trap – which is to dismiss the obvious.
Obviousness is a marker of profundity. The more quotidian, mundane and prosaic a thing, the more important it is … that’s why we do it or say it, or why it manifests most often.
Sunsets, tides, cleaning the house, breathing, the thought ‘I should change my life’ … all these things occur constantly, are they losing relevance for that?
Of course not, they’re all vital, all worth repeating, all sacred.
We waste the opportunity to enjoy and learn from obvious things when we dismiss them as such … When we start to ignore them in favour of a search for something else … We're never sure what that something is, but we have the feeling that it must be something less obvious, more complicated, more remote from where we are, now.
Speaking purely for myself, it’s not as though I’ve mastered balance in my life – so why am I deciding that I needn’t bother pursuing the thoughts that came up when I saw the tightrope walker? That’s ego, trying to knock me off the rope.
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We are all walking the tightrope of life, seeking balance, trying not to fall too far either side of the path …
The wording of this statement may be hackneyed, but the truth of it is not.
The phrase is only hackneyed within the context of culture, which, of course, is the context in which we’re receiving it.
But, as we begin to appreciate, along the path of our artist’s journey, the relative shallowness of culture in relation to the infinite depths of creativity from which all culture springs - we might start to consider that it is us who have become hackneyed and unable to discern the wisdom – which is really to say the life – in everyday things and thoughts.
This happens when we take to viewing things solely through our rigidly conditioned acculturated minds rather than from the infinite, unconditioned openness of our creative centre.
Another way to say this is to say, we narrow our possibility of insight when we appraise things purely with the mind - we expand the possibility of insight when we first, feel into them, and then allow an independent thought process to arise out of that feeling.
I'm not saying that thinking about things is a lesser approach or not worth doing - I wouldn't be writing this if I thought that - I'm just saying that your feeling about a thing is the primary indicator of its relevance to you.
That last part is very important because, because the things that you feel drawn to as important will not always be same things as other people. The conditioned mind is formed in relation to the general consensus - so if you're deciding what you should and should not to pay attention to based solely on that, you will overlook a lot of important opportunities for growth.
I end with this question: can we approach the obvious, over and over again with fresh enthusiasm and curiosity – the way children do – as part of a practice of life, which ultimately
draws us into a deeper and deeper understanding of what is?
I think that's a good approach, because truth, formulated any way at all, is always alive, if we are alive to it.