Life is one big assembly line of new things coming into our lives. Every day new things walk right in. There are the things we purchase from stores. There are also new experiences. This includes insights, the way the sun strikes things, how we feel moment to moment, hearing something that changes our life, people that we know changing how they feel about things, a road we usually take being closed for repairs, the same road now smoother.
The amount of new experiences continuously coming into our lives is vast. A lot of it goes unnoticed because we tend to discount them. Things we can hold in our hands, or put in our bodies, or drive around in, or that we can plug into the wall, or download from the internet are marketed with the idea of value. Marketing puts things in a spotlight. We are trained to think of these things as more important. But the problem is it's hard to maintain the importance of something. We get used to these new things fast.
The constant stream of new experiences comes without going to a store or ordering them online. I think because they are constant they mostly go unnoticed. The value of experiences starts to be noticed when the excitement of the tangible things loses it's allure. The 'things' spotlight dims and suddenly there's this whole other world that's much more alive.
As I'm writing this, a super bright sunbeam is cascading across the table and my laptop. It's so bright and vital that is seems alive. It feels like it has little fingers as it crawls across my hands. I'm enjoying imagining it showed up because I'm writing about these kind of experiences. The great thing is the light beam is capturing my attention in a positive way. It's enthralling. It beats any song I have on my ipod.
Another great thing is as the light's passing over the table and moving onto the floor, I can't hang onto it. I got to enjoy it for what it was and that was enough. Now it looks like someone spilled liquid sunlight on my carpet.