Over breakfast in a mall last week, my father explained that the meaning of life is simple, not complex. It’s we who get in the way of making it work – not external circumstances. Imagine, he said, that every act or thought is sacred. That your very being and doing – from gifting a present, to moving the salt cellar across a dining room table – is an act of the highest spiritual importance.
It’s not necessary to be religious, or particularly saintly, to visualise this concept, or try it out. Just imagine it, he said, and see what happens. This theory has stayed with me, though I did forget, regularly, to treat each moment as a sacred one; particularly when daughter and friends left dirty socks and empty packets mouldering in the bedroom post-sleepover, or when son argued about screen time boundaries.
The theory also failed to move me into a higher state of consciousness when I slid into an unexpected deadline crunch on Friday, and spilled iced water on my bag, and twisted my knee trying to burn calories. But in between, where those moments of clarity live quietly, waiting for you to remember them, I remembered, and imagined that I was a sacred being, and that tick-ticking at my laptop – just the act of it – was a vital and necessary cog in the mysterious machine that is real, authentic living. For those few seconds – and they really are small snatches of mindfulness – the hormones of stress relent and the purpose of living becomes exactly what you are doing at that time and in that place. Just moving from one room to another, in this state of mind, takes on a significance that is hard to understand but easy to feel.
It’s a sense of peace, rather than power; a sense of innate understanding, rather than stress. I often watch children at play (which is their life’s work, in childhood) and now, for the first time, I see that their wisdom is still at full throttle – they understand the meaning of the sacred act, and its importance.
When you watch a three-year-old slowly, deliberately pour sand into a bucket, or rapidly, joyfully swing back and forth in a playground, it’s fair to say that they aren’t thinking about yesterday, tomorrow, or next week. Yesterday, my son and his friend Robson decorated the Christmas tree. For the half-hour it took to untangle tinsel and dangle baubles in style-cringy bunches on the plastic branches, there was nothing more relevant than that moment. Once they were finished, they moved onto the next sacred act – examining a crystal collection – and then celebrated their purposefulness with ice-cream.
For them, it was a good day, while it lasted, and every moment was important, and special and held tremendous gravity – more gravity, in fact, than the self-important, pompous events we adults inflict on the world, convinced that political stage-acting and grey-suited big business must be more meaningful than the placement of the star on the tree, or the bauble on a branch.
Children treat sandcastle-building, swinging, decorating, playing, eating, running, laughing and being as sacred acts. They don’t know why they do it – but they don’t need to. The act of being is enough.