Telling ourselves about our life is not the same as living it.
I was on a jeep tour through the desert dunes in a foreign land. There were four of us in the vehicle. It was a magnificent morning, with the sun just coming up. The landscape was vast and also foreign, totally unknown. It had the potential for a transformative experience, traversing the infinite sand, feeling the soft, warm breeze, and watching the orange sun rise and the purple moon descend all at once. It had the potential for transformation, but it did not happen.
For two hours, the man next to me, a fellow traveler, told us everything we could or would ever need to know about the desert, and everything we might actually be experiencing. The name of each flower and when it bloomed, how the sand made its formations, how people had traversed it over time. So too, we “learned” about water: where it pooled and why, how long different species could survive without it, what it did for our cells, why we dehydrate, what happens to us when we do, and other facts. And, there was the history of the dunes: great authors and artists who’d been inspired by them, the battles waged on them, and so on. There was also a complex description of what happens to us psychologically and spiritually in vast open spaces and how the emptiness impacts us emotionally and mentally. Finally, there was an explanation of the jeep we were riding in, its tires, what they were made of, how they were constructed, why they worked in the sand, the company that produced its history…and…well, you get the point.
The result was that we never got to be in the desert dunes, to fully experience the magical, mysterious, beautiful landscape through which we were driving. We never got to soak in that desert flower, feel the sizzling heat on our skin, taste the sand on our lips, melt under the thick breeze, or experience the magic we were hearing about.
We ended up stuck, in Alan Watts’ words, living the “menu not the meal.” All too often, we’re trapped in lives that are “about” our lives; we only get so close as to be talking, thinking, and knowing “about” our experience, but we don’t actually get to meet our experience directly. At the end of the day, we are imprisoned in a life that’s a step away from life—knowing and understanding the contents of our lives, but not actually encountering it. In this way, we are cast out of life, desperately trying to subsist on the description of our experience, to feel nourished by what we can know about what’s here.
But we can’t eat the menu, can’t derive any real nourishment or satisfaction from just the words and descriptions of what we can eat. The menu is undoubtedly helpful in describing the meal, and allowing us to talk about what we might taste, smell, and delight in. But on its own, the menu can’t feed us physically, psychologically, spiritually, or in any other way.
We wonder why we feel so frustrated and unsatisfied by our lives, cut off from an unreachable deeper meaning, an experience that feels just out of reach. We are psychologically and spiritually malnourished, starving for the direct experience of living. But it’s not our fault. We are unsatisfied because we live through knowing, understanding, making sense of, figuring out, and explaining once again, “about” living. As a result, we are purgatoried, perpetually and un-understandably cut off and separated from the unfathomable richness, meaning, and sustenance of being embodied and alive—the profundity of life.
And so we go to the mall, buy things and buy more things, renovate our homes, re-landscape our lawns, re-do our bodies, binge-watch Netflix, ingest alcohol, swallow Xanax, and do all sorts of other things, ultimately, to fill the void between living directly and living about-ly, and to feed the starvation that’s left when we try to nourish ourselves with just the menu.
Notice in your own life where and how you’re living the menu but not the meal. Become aware of how you use your thoughts to separate you from life and, in the process, deprive yourself of the nourishment and richness of being in life. If you pass by a flower, try just seeing, smelling, and feeling it, observe without even attaching the word you call it, what you know about its species, what it symbolizes in your mind, your past memories with it, and any other storylines about it. As an experiment, try removing the words, labels, stories, judgments, and ideas about what’s appearing in your life. Try experiencing your life nakedly, without the wet suit of thoughts between you and the ocean of life. Give it a whirl…you might just find the nourishment and satisfaction you’re searching for, that the menu can never provide.
