“This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.”
Maya Angelou
Sitting with a cup of coffee, the reliable comfort that settles my morning, I begin to plan my day, listing the things I want to finish or start. It’s an optimistic bundle, a bristlecone of activity.
Maya Angelou’s words invite a pleasant disruption. The art of seeing and the skill of planning occupy separate parts of the mind. Seeing is not cognitive, it’s a whole-bodied, sensory experience that removes me from the sometimes oppressive pressure of thinking. More than observation, seeing is immersive, allowing the world to enter through my perceptions and land in the cradle of my body.
Why is this a wonderful day? Is it so different from yesterday or the day before?
Failure to see the singular wonder in every day is a loss, and that is Maya’s warning. When my brain runs on autopilot, running the film of previous days on the movie screen of my mind, I’m sedated by the rush of images. If I peek behind the blurry curtain of the autopilot, I see the full texture of life: palpable, sensuous, reds and purples seething and brimming, sights and sounds splashing and spilling like a river overflowing its banks, pleading with me to slow my breathless pace and match my breathing to the rhythm of natural time.
Outside my window, finches chatter in conversation; a breeze lifts the last reluctant leaves from their branches and rattles them across the road; a black sheen colors the puddles; my familiar coffee becomes exotic, the warm liquid in my mouth retrieving something from ancestral memory that puts me in kinship with the first human who thought to brew the bean.
Each day, a door opens at dawn and closes at dusk. What a shame to let it pass without acknowledging I’ve never seen this one before and celebrating its arrival, unique and wondrous.
Photo from Ales Krivec on Unsplash