dailydatewithgod

One of the fascinating things about children is their energetic enthusiasm for everything they experience.  This stems from the fact that usually what they are experiencing is new to them.  Life holds such novelty for them whether it is the toes of an infant or the sound of a fart for a three-year-old.  There is a fascination with finding more things that enable them to embody the novelty of life.  The curiosity propels them forward to search out more and more novelty.  Without being able to name it, the experience of novelty in their body, mind, and heart is invigorating and life-fueling. There was a moment that stands out in my mind to this day when I was in the throws of my food addiction. I remember musing when I stopped for an order at Burger King that something was gone.  I remembered back to how as a kid there was this excitement and I correlated it to a particular smell (a good one) of going to Burger King.  In the present moment, the smell was not there.  In the past, there had been a novelty because it was not an everyday thing.  It was my dad taking my sister and me for something fun to eat we couldn’t get at home. By the time I was knee-deep in my addiction it had long surpassed any kind of novelty or excitement. I was too busy using it as a vehicle towards a numbing and slow death. My experience may have been dramatic but as adults, we all lose touch with the novelty present at a young age.  The more known things and people are to us the more we take for granted the idea that they are known. If we are willing to pause and consider that there is novelty still present in all of those known elements, we can awaken our heart’s capacity to be in the unknown. There are many Saturdays and they happen every week but there will never be another Saturday like this one.  We may take a shower each day (and I hope you do) but we will not feel the hot water on our skin in exactly the same way.  The novelty is there if we allow our minds to let go of the known even for a moment and be in the present with our hearts. We can see the people in our lives with novelty, hear things with newness, and take in new information from an area we decided we already knew everything about.  Each of these elements teaches us something new about spreading the novelty into knowing the unknown about ourselves. Making room for novelty alters our perspective of life because it changes who we are being. Changing who we are being, changes what we see about our lives and those around us. Like the saying attributed to Anais Nin: “We do not see things as they, we see things as we are.”