The Best Quote I’ve Ever Heard. (Ever.)
Okay, I’ve heard a lot of great quotes that could be “the best.”
This Marianne Williamson quote is forever inspiring to me and many others, for example.
I also love this quote, not by Audrey Hepburn.
Yet the simple fact exists that the quote I’m about to share is the single most encouraging string of words that has crossed my path since my dear friend and yoga teacher recited it in class a few months ago.
It’s uplifting because it’s a reminder to take heart in our humanness and the sheer power of being, even and especially on our most ordinary of days.
And, personally, the entire point of much of my writing is to emphasize how every day can be an opportunity to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Every waking moment that I inhale a new breath and then let it back out is a chance to have the best day of my life.
So, today, a seemingly ordinary day, let me share this remembrance that we are great.
“As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?”
~ Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
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