Get Your Money’s Worth Out of Life

Today is my daughter’s first birthday, and our shared birthday party, and I am spending time with her. This is a post I wrote originally in 2011 for the Learning to Think cycle. It seems appropriate to the day. I still stand by the philosophy that imbues it.

“I cannot be overcharged for anything. I always get my money’s worth out of life.” – Lestat de Lioncourt, The Vampire Lestat

This is one of the little side benefits of learning to think. You’ve learned to focus, you’ve learned to notice the world around you, you’ve learned to split off a part of your brain for one task and do another. Individually, all very useful. I’ve been stressing the utility so far. Taken together, they could be quite powerful. This is what I’m hoping for.

But they are not merely useful.

Let’s suppose that you have had no experience of the beautiful stillness during your meditation, found no answers there. Or that the feeling of brain split is not as intriguingly eerie to you as it is to me. I’m speaking of something a bit more down-to-earth: putting your thinking talents to the sensual world.

Focus on that first bite of fettuccini alfredo that your friend made, the way you focus on your breath. Note the particular flavors, feelings, sensations. Use words or work wordlessly, your choice. Now take the second bite, compare it with the first. Is there more sauce in this bite? Perhaps a caper? How is it different? How has it changed? Leave off quality judgements, ‘good or bad,’ ‘better or worse,’ ask how they are simply different.

Wring every last ounce of experience, of pure sensual indulgence, out of the moment. It only comes this way once.

Ah, but why bother stopping that lovely conversation you were having? Take a moment and split your brain, and put one train of thought on the moment, and let the other follow the conversation.

There it is: Meditation, simulflow, petit perception, wound together, in service of no greater goal except joy.

Or, if you are an adventurer like I am, take your next adventure. Harry Lorayne bemoans the sort of traveler who goes and knows they have wonderful memories, but cannot recall anything about them. I’m sure they bemoan themselves, too. And I’m equally sure you don’t want to be one.

Wander the streets of your home town, and take in all the smells (florid and fetid) and the glittering of towers, while keeping a weather eye out for pickpockets. When you go to Egypt, you may be worrying about how long it will be until lunch, or how much you hate that fat loud woman behind you, or how crowded it is. But you can spin off a part of yourself, and let it gaze in awe and wonder at the Pyramids and the inscrutable Sphinx. Let it drink in every detail, take a snapshot behind your eyes, assemble a vast room inside your skull full of nooks and crannies stuffed to bursting with this one moment, where you stood and faced the Pyramids, and were amazed.

Grand adventures, lonely walks, exhilarating races, new cocktails, new faces, massages, meals, sex…take it all, and drink deeply. Drink as deep as you want. You have given yourself the ability to drink deeper than ever, and the world is Thor’s great drinking horn, and cannot be bottomed.

Some of my more spiritually-inclined friends have reproached me for this focus on the sensual. Shouldn’t our minds be focused, not on our food, but on higher things?

I have a few answers to this. First, do Christians not witness the transubstantiation, and know communion from a bite of bread and a sip of wine? My mother calls it “the Mystery,” and it is for her what great books are for me, a tall drink of cool water when I did not know I was thirsty. I cannot imagine how the spiritual nature of the mystery could be diminished by acceptance of and focus on the reality of the moment, the sound of the choir and the taste of the wafer and the wetness of the wine, all at once.

However, most of my detractors here are not Christian. Some are Buddhist, and I can only answer them that this is why I am not Buddhist. I cannot accept any spirituality that does not delight in the world. Whether it is knowing God through His work, or appreciating the ineffable, formless pattern that is and undergirds all things, or respect for the gods of the trees and grasses (and cities and automobiles), I feel that a true spirituality must embrace the world we can see as well as the world we cannot. To delight in that world is no crime, if you can let it go as well.

There are prosaic uses for what you’ve learned here: bringing your attention back to your balance sheet, writing an email while answering the boss’ question, finding defects in questionable merchandise, remembering the price of something.

But you can also remember the value and the worth of something, find the curve of a lover’s back, listen to two great songs together, bring your attention back to your food.

And you can never again be overcharged. Go get your money’s worth out of life. Go now.