Discover the Hidden Beauty in Life’s Small Moments
Is there anything in your everyday world that encapsulates wonder? For me, it is the mid-afternoon sun streaming in through the window, framing the white wall with the outlines of sun and shade.
It is a perfect moment and like any moment, it is quickly gone—something happens to the quality of light, the brightness fades, the shade distorts, but time invariably throws it off.
But for that one moment, there is a sense of perfection.
I pick it up in an intuitive sense, perhaps the rods and cones in my eyes reacting to something distant, something primal, rooted in my evolution to seek out light, but I always pick it up. I’ve been this way since I was a child.
Some of my earliest memories are being on the soccer field where my daycare was and the sun going behind a cloud and a distinct shift in my mood until the sun shone brightly again.
We live in a world that pushes towards the grand and monumental.
The achievements, the accomplishments, the drive is often the thing that is recognized to give us meaning. It is the events, the first date, the promotion, the deadline, the vacation, that come to define our sense of time, that give us the anticipation or the anxiety of the future.
And so often, our culture glosses over the seemingly unremarkable details of our everyday experience. We are told it has nothing to teach us, that only the striving and determination is the thing that holds lessons.
The Profound Impact of Wonder: Transforming Mundane Details into Sacred Experiences
James Schuyler in “February” offers a different version of this reality.
Suddenly, the everyday, the mundane, the unremarkable becomes charged with meaning, bursting in the sort of interconnectedness of a spiritual revelation.
I have always loved this poem; I think it is ultimately a perfect poem.
In the poem, he has a willingness to pause and notice those things which often blur into the backgrounds of our lives: the tulips sitting in a glass of water on the desk, a smoking chimney, the rumble of trucks turning up the street. It becomes the everyday scene of a day in late winter, early spring, “it’s a day like any other,” which is why the mystical takes over in this scene.
Ultimately here we need to pause in the poem, as we move from one unremarkable depiction of sight or sound to the next, we must come back to how ordinary everything actually is.
Everything is as it is and yet it is all bursting with meaning, charged with significance, and yet nothing dramatic happens.
Naturally, it leads the reader to reflect that the very nature of reality, the composition of this everyday is charged with sacred if we choose to see it.
How Poetry Teaches Us to See the World with Fresh Eyes
One of my favorite lines of the poem, after all this color and sound and shifting from one thing to the next, the poet stops and reflects, “I can’t get over / how it all works in together.”
The quickness of taking this entire scene in mirrors the ephemeral qualities of the scene itself and suddenly this burst of reflection and wonder.
It is seeing this extraordinary in the everyday and the connections between them, the web of relationships, that Schuyler creates this tapestry of the wonder in the transient moment.
And yet, it is just a day like any other.
Even this day itself that is birthing the poem isn’t treated as somehow holding more power than any other day, just like each sight or sound in the poem isn’t given more priority or hierarchy than any other.
Each thing stands as it is, and the whole of it together connected is the revelation.
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The poet is not desiring or attaching himself to any one thing.
The baby and the mother are given the same treatment as the sun over the UN building or the tulip on the desk. No one thing becomes greater than any other. Because he is not clinging to any one thing and is free to move in the changing of the descriptions, he isn’t resistant to change.
So often in our lives, the suffering we have is because we have resisted change.
Rather than accepting it going away and moving on, we cling to it and fight for it, determined to deny the loss.
What I have seen in my own life is that pride goes before the fall. Oftentimes, this resistance to change, to accepting and moving on, or to holding something so tightly because I am afraid of losing it, is because my own perception of myself cannot be without this thing.
It has come to define me, and when I lose that definition of myself, my pride or ego will do anything to recover that loss.
Until I can let go and accept the loss, I cannot rewrite my self-definition. Let me be clear that I do not think that desire or attachment is inherently bad. It isn’t.
It is my refusal to acknowledge the impermanence of life that leads to the suffering.
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James Schuyler’s Wisdom: Finding Wonder in the Everyday
It seems to me that ultimately this is a poem of gratitude. It is a celebration of the mundane details that make up a day in February, but it is the gratitude behind the poem which allows these seemingly unremarkable details to shine through.
There is scientific proof that a practice of gratitude changes one’s brainwaves; it is the shift needed to go from only seeing the shadows out the window to only seeing the light.
Sometimes in life it isn’t the massive shift either; I think we get so caught up in the 90-day before and after fitness pictures that we miss the small stuff.
Sometimes just moving my chair 3 inches to the right allows me to perceive and experience the world in a completely different way.
Suddenly like Schuyler, I can see the light moving from pink to gray. I can see the tulip in the glass. I can see the pink of the baby in the mother’s arms.
And I’m struck in wonder by how it all works together, on a day like any other.
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