Awake and alive
Let the world astonish you with its moments of love.
May we remember that sometimes the fragments of meaning we make are just the right size to hold in our hands.—Lisa Friedman
The other morning, I finished the last of a bottle of orange juice and was rinsing out the container before tossing it into the recycling bin, when something on the label caught my eye. Something seemed off. See if you can spot it. (Hint: It’s not that the barcode is sideways.)
I realize “serving suggestions” are often idealized, like the cracker on a box of Triscuits looking like it was prepared by a professional caterer (and piled high with nearly a Happy Meal’s worth of food). But I saw those oranges and thought: How do I get all the juice back inside the fruit before serving?
After writing in the marketing world for many years, I know that a lot of thought goes into labeling a mass-market product and that the process for approving it can be painstaking. So it surprised me that Aldi, a $100 billion-a-year-plus company, signed off on an image that simply made no sense.
Until it did. Here I had thought I had one over Aldi’s marketing department. Like professional proofreaders who fire off letters to publishers to inform them of typos in their bestsellers, I was already composing the email to Aldi in my head. Then I noticed something else: The leaf sticking out of the orange slice on the right is at an unnatural angle that appears to be photoshopped in. Then I saw that it matched the angle of the green leaf in the Simply Nature logo in the upper left corner. Exactly.
It was all intentional. The serving suggestion is suggesting that Aldi’s orange juice is so fresh, you are actually serving fresh oranges. The leaf plastered on the orange slice at a weird angle is subtly reinforcing brand identity. Our minds are being played with.
And that, dear reader, is why you and I need to stay awakened to the world.
There is a lot of talk these days about being “woke,” as if consciously endeavoring to see the world as it really is is a bad thing. What gets lost in all the rhetoric is how much we all miss in our daily lives, how asleep we sometimes are in our waking hours despite our desire and efforts to live life fully. My wife and I have bought that same bottle of orange juice many times, and only now did I notice that the label is kind of hilarious. What else have I been missing?
Some of my readers know this story, but for the sake of completeness I’ll include it here: In ancient India, perhaps somewhere between 400 and 500 BCE, a young aristocrat named Siddhartha Gautama renounced his wealthy lifestyle and achieved enlightenment. He would become known as the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. Shortly after his enlightenment, the Buddha started to wander around India. One day he encountered several men who recognized him to be a very extraordinary being. They asked him: "Are you a god?" "No," he replied. "Are you a reincarnation of a god?" "No," he replied. "Are you a wizard, then?" "No." "Well, are you a man?" "No."
"So what are you?" they asked, puzzled. Buddha simply replied: "I am awake." Buddha means “the awakened one.”
I’d like to take it this a little further and propose that to be awake is not so much to be constantly aware but to be ready—ready to be surprised, even astonished—surprised at being surprised by the universe once again. That’s what I experienced with the bottle of orange juice. It was a little moment of perplexity, brought to me by the world, but only revealed when I paid attention to what the world was whispering in my ear. Such a moment is one of the ways the world loves us back. As I wrote in an earlier edition of “Now You See It,” love’s greatest attribute may be its limitless capacity to surprise.
In an essay titled, “Astonishment Is Our Natural State of Mind,” Paul Harris, one of the most creatively brilliant magicians of our time, writes that the astonishment we experience when witnessing an artfully performed piece of magic reveals our earliest, brightest selves to ourselves. Astonishment, Harris writes, is “a state of mind we experienced naturally as small children but that society devalued then made taboo as we became adults.”
You came into this world a blank slate. No ideas about who you are or what anything is. You’re just being. And it feels great … because there are no options, or opinions or judgments. There is no right or wrong. Everything is everything.
Then, very quickly, we learn stuff. The names of ten thousand things, who we are, what we’re supposed to be, what’s good and bad according to the current rules of the game. And you organize all of this information into little boxes. And when any new information comes along you file it into the appropriate box.[1]
The moment of astonishment a magician can provide, Harris writes, is a kind of unboxing.
And then along comes a focused piece of strange in the form of a magical effect. Your trained mind races into action and tries to put this piece of strange into one of its rational boxes. But no box will hold it. At that moment of trying to box the unboxable your world-view breaks up. The boxes are gone. And what’s left? Simply what was always there. Your natural state of mind ... you have the experience of going from a cluttered adult mind to the original clear space.
Astonishment is not an emotion that’s created. It’s an existing state that’s revealed.
I have faith that creating and holding a clear space is what many of us are trying to do in staying awakened to the world. But it comes at a cost. Many people I know, myself included, tend to put ourselves under a lot of pressure to make the world a better place, and it sometimes threatens to break us. That, and we get accused of being "woke."
I’m not sure what the clever rejoinder is to someone who says to me, “Oh, there you go again, being ‘woke.’” My response could be, “I’m sorry if I caught you sleeping,” but I can’t see being mean or biting. I’d rather express my sympathies, because the very act of calling someone ‘woke’ with a sneer is superficial and I’d rather say to that person, you know, it’s not worthy of you, that remark. Surely you can find a better way to chastise me for insisting on love?
Besides, if I were truly awake, such a remark wouldn’t bother me. I’d be too busy living and anticipating my next moment of astonishment. However, I still think I would take the time to defy that person’s attempt at dehumanizing not me but themselves. To do so would be honoring their inherent worth and dignity.
Because just living our day to day, righteously, consciously, alive-ly, is not only an act of courage but an act of loving defiance. And it’s hard.
Maybe our task is not to convince others of the truth, of the need to stay awake. We’ve seen how that goes down in our own country. It doesn’t work, it never has, and it probably never will. Rather, the task may be to live our lives as pointers to truth—to live in a way that inspires others to discover their own truths and the truth of the world around them. To live unflinchingly honestly. To remain open to surprise.
We search, we point somewhere, and we invite others to join us as we venture out on that untrammeled road. The big lesson in little moments like deciphering the label on a bottle of orange juice is not what the truth of it is. That was interesting. It’s that I was astonished that my mind first went to now smart and clever I was to have one over on Aldi, where here I thought I was a righteous guy. That was humbling. And humbling experiences are gifts to me, for they keep me grounded.
Most moments of astonishment, whether they come courtesy of a great card trick or the whispering world, are kind of humbling, because they remind us that we don’t know everything, which is pretty much the ultimate truth if you think about it. In that respect we are lucky. Because we are our world’s children. And with our world constantly nudging us from our slumbers, urging us to pay attention, we always have something at work within us to help us stay awake—so that we ourselves might awaken the world each and every blessed day we are alive.
Behind the curtain
Astute and awake observers may have noticed that “Now You See It” did not publish this past Sunday. We were preparing our taxes this past weekend, but the real reason for the no-show is that today’s post is a completely rewritten version of what was to go out Sunday. I had drafted most of the post about how I had discovered that Aldi made an error on a label for its organic orange juice, and how this was a great example of how asleep even huge corporations can be. Then I awoke, and the rest is history. Sometimes humility demands a rewrite.
[1] Harris, Paul. The Art of Astonishment: Pieces of Strange to Unleash the Moment. (Rancho Cordova, California: Murphy’s Magic Supplies, Inc. 1996/2007), 6.