Children see everything as new, everything is mysterious and they’re curious. 

Adults jump to conclusions, and we’re certain, and we already know everything. 

So to get back to that childlike wonder, we have to focus on the cause of that, which is our comparative mindset.

We compare this moment to the last. We compare this thing to the same thing we saw yesterday. But every moment is different. The light reflects off differently every moment of every object, and the atmosphere is constantly changing. There is a newness, but we have to get in touch with that subtlety and that curiosity.

We have to really practice being present because it’s in being present where there is no comparison to the past, and where we aren’t certain of everything that’s going to happen.

So many people are either optimists or pessimists, right? And whichever one they are, they’re both certain that either something good or something bad is going to happen. Well, I’m an “I-don’t-knowist.” Because that’s the truth that I’ve found that we just don’t know.

When we jump to conclusions, when we panic, when we freak out because we think something bad’s going to happen, and then we find out it’s not so bad. Or even if it was so bad, we can get through it. We still have functioning brains. And this moment needed this action, and now this moment needs different action. And we can just be in the moment, and respond in a more thoughtful and conscientious way.

We simply practice being present through meditation, or through turning every activity into an opportunity to be mindful. And we can do that by occasionally not wearing headphones as we walk, and listening to the full sounds that we hear on our walk. Or we could put the phone down on the train and just look around.

Every single thing we do is either a practice to be mindful or a practice to be mindless. What are we practicing when we brush our teeth and we’re not present? When we get dressed but we’re just robotic? We are training ourselves to be mindless, and not present, and not focused.

We can simply feel what we’re feeling in our hands. We can smell what we’re smelling. We can observe the sounds and sights around us with curiosity and wonder. And by doing this, we are training our minds to be in that childlike wondrous state, but with the wisdom that we have gained from experience.

Very important: our mind is what often determines our focus. And the eyes see objects. The ears hear the sound. But it’s a much subtler experience to see the space between the objects, to hear the silence that allows for the sounds we perceive to arise, which is always there underneath.

Just like underneath whatever we’re thinking, whatever we’re feeling, there is a blank, empty, spacious stillness that allows for all of the variety of things to appear.

We have really disconnected ourselves from that subtlety, from our feeling, our intuition, our sensing. And this is because we’ve created hyper-stimulating entertainment, food, etc. And so we’ve gone even further from that stillness and that peace that is always there.

When we are constantly doing and interacting with the physical world, we’re constantly reinforcing that focus. So just simply allowing some spaciousness in our lives, closing our eyes, watching a sunset or the stars, where we are literally looking out to infinity and tapping that spaciousness, we can begin to realize there is something between the false perception of separateness.

And it’s really easy. Once you know it’s there, then you’re always in touch with it. You can be in the most chaotic situations or the slowest traffic, loudest horns and you can still realize that there is that silence that allows those car horns to be heard. And there is that space that allows for that traffic.

In simply expanding our perspective, to the objects and the space, to the energy and the particles that make up our physical world, we bring peace into the chaos.

If there was no silence, we would just be hearing all the noises at once, and we wouldn’t be able to hear any. And if there was no space, there would be no room to walk around, no place for the variety of forms to arise.

These are interconnected. And there is no barrier, just because we are not microscopic creatures able to see microscopic nuances and subtleties. But we know that every object is mostly empty space and is pure radiating energy out of every atom inside of it.

So we don’t need to limit our perspective. We don’t need to only believe in what we can see, because we know there’s so much more. And it’s not a delusion to broaden our perspective, in fact, it’s where all wisdom arises.