What are you grateful for?

I am grateful for my nervous system and how it miraculously runs every life-sustaining program behind the scenes without my input. I am thankful for my sense of self and my gradual waking up to it. I am forever thankful for every step, obstacle, and generous teacher and guide who has literally and hypothetically held my arm along the journey that got me here.

I am grateful for science as a tool for understanding. I am grateful for the freedom of thought and the various technologies, starting with language, that enabled generous authors and teachers to navigate me through the long, transformative, and arduous journey that landed me here.

“What do you mean by ‘here’?” you may be asking. By ‘here,’ I mean this place where I am—finally—able to notice, fully experience, and appreciate the reality that I’ve always been home.

“How long did it take me to become privy to this insight?” It took me about thirty-four years of rotations around the Sun. Like Santiago in The Alchemist, I spent a dozen of those rotations hopping over oceans—from continent to continent, switching from one school to another, one job to another, one friend to another, one lover to another, and changing one object for another—like a wanderer in the desert. All that time, like Santiago, it seemed like I was on a quest to find a hidden treasure that would make me rich once I found it.

Little did I know that the hidden treasure I was expecting to make me rich was the proverbial box—in which to fit or belong. And even less did I know that the actual hidden treasure I’ve been almost selling my soul for, for the last thirty-something years of my life, is hidden inside me. It recently dawned on me that—all this time—I’ve always had a beautiful home, deeply hidden in the deepest parts of me, waiting for me to fully inhabit it.

I recently understood that to fully belong at home, one has to be home long. In other words, one has to stay, exist, or be present at home longer to feel a sense of belonging. The key to belonging might be to bring one’s full self to bear—from the inside out.

Put another way, the key to begin satisfying the ‘love and belonging’ need might be to connect and honor all of you. To learn about and eventually get to know, understand, own, accept, and love all that you are; right now, as you are in the present. This requires one to, first and foremost, take a keen interest in oneself. It seems the way to graduate out of the “Love and Belonging Needs” class is by embracing and fully inhabiting all that one is.

The wisdom I found in Elvis Presley’s song Home Is Where The Heart Is is double-fold. First is that one’s ultimate home is within. Second is that ‘within’ is where ‘you’ are—where your heart—one’s essence—is.

Recently, I learned that if you haven’t inhabited this internal place that is home for a long time, intentionally taking a dozen or so focused and controlled breaths—slowly inhaling and exhaling—with one’s eyes closed is akin to knocking at the front door of one’s inner sanctuary, one’s true home. When riding air in and out of my lungs, I’ve learned to close my eyes and notice—and appreciate—a lot of things.

I’ve learned to be grateful for the passing of time. For, the more time passes, the closer I get to home. I am grateful for the gift of breath. The more I notice my breathing, the more time and energy I see that I inherently have inside of me. More time and energy to breathe more. I am grateful for the life force I notice inside me—the force that expands and contracts my lungs and animates my heart to beat within me subtly.

I am grateful for the innumerable cells and chemicals inside me—as numerous as the sand on the shores of the ocean or stars in the galaxy—that make up this structure I call my body. For this body, I will forever remain thankful. For having gracefully held and carried everything that is within me—since I was nothing but a single zygote cell, traveling along one of the fallopian tubes on its way to my mom’s womb. I am grateful for my body’s every cell, tissue, and organ and how they mysteriously collaborate to allow me to experience life in all of its bliss.

I am grateful for my sense of hearing and the genius that has endowed me with such a cool feature. Sometimes, when I am quiet enough—eyes closed, quietly attending to each inhale and exhale—I can even hear my heartbeat—in both the temples and the chest. By the sound of the heart, I know I am already home—for home, after all, is where the heart is.

Home is a magnificent place. Even though a few are aware of it, all of us have a sophisticated interface that renders the outside world inside us in some mind-bending ways. When I contemplate mine, I am left with immense gratitude and awe with appreciation for how little I know and understand all that I am, how I work, and how I know what I know.

For instance, how is it that—with my eyes closed—the song that a bird is singing from a distance is playing right in my inner sanctuary? It’s not even one bird. It sounds like it’s a whole choir of birds. That they are singing is also a naïve assumption on my behalf. For all I know, it can also be a community of birds having a remote town hall meeting. How can I—at the same time—also hear the sound of bristling tree branches and their leaves as the gentle breeze blows on them? How does it work that I can hear the sound of those coming and going cars and trucks driving far in the distance—when I can’t see them, even if my eyes were open? How can I even tell the difference between a regular car’s engine sound and a big truck’s? How about the occasional humming of planes flying and birds flocking overhead now and then?

Better yet—crickets, birds, wind blowing, engines of cars, the lawnmower I can hear from the other side of the neighborhood, the intermittent pounding of the builder’s mallet from a distance, and the static-ish sound that is made up of all the small sounds that remain when everything else is quiet around—how come I never noticed all of this cacophony of sounds before?

I am grateful for the sense of touch. I am grateful for my skin and all of the billions of antennas—that are my skin hairs—mounted on it to capture the outside world and render it for me—on the big home screen of experience inside. I marvel at my ignorance and powerlessness in not having anything to do—except some minor upkeep and protection from damage—for any of it to work. At the same time, I marvel at the wisdom of it all and how it works: that—with my eyes closed—I can feel the caress of the gentle breeze on my skin; that I can feel the tender kiss of the sun’s rays hitting the left side of my face and my left arm. How beautifully and ingeniously we are all wired! How does it all work so magnificently?

I am grateful for my sense of smell. I am curious as to why I don’t smell as well as I hear and sense touch. I seem to be inhaling air just about every other second or so, but I can’t tell you what said air smells like. Of course, I can feel the slight tingly sensation of the air gliding off of the tiny hairs in my nostrils. And, don’t get me wrong, I can still smell both good food and a fart from a mile away. But as I sit outside, on this beautiful summer day, I can’t tell you what I smell of the particles that make up the air I am breathing (1).

I am also in awe of the fact that it seems as though one nostril or the other is slightly more open—and rarely both fully open at the same time. They seem to alternate their full opening schedule. The left nostril fully opens when the right nostril is slightly open, and vice-versa.

I am grateful that I can feel the weight of my body in the chair on the surface where the chair’s cushion and my buttocks meet. I am also grateful that I can feel my legs’ weight resting on my feet on the ground. As I shift my body forward to write these lines, I can feel my weight being distributed between my heels, ankles, and the soles of my feet.

I am grateful for the physics of nature, time, and space. I am grateful for how sound waves work. I am grateful for the sophisticated apparatus that are my ears, and my entire hearing system—which reaches out into the world and brings it to me to experience in my sanctuary without me having to move. All I ever have to do is attend, to be present, and the whole world is here—inside, home.

I am grateful for the sense of vision. Fully attuning to sight enables me to appreciate what is meant by the saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For instance, I just tried to behold the scene above, in front, to the sides, and behind me. For the first time, I noticed that the clear blue sky above is not entirely clear blue; not all across anyway. Scanning the sky from left to right—the sun almost overhead but still slightly to the left—I notice that the sky to the west is not as clearly blue as it is to the east. The west’s sky is a tad bit darker.

Also, thanks to the gift that is light and the electromagnetic spectrum that my retina is sensitive to, I can now appreciate how the colors of the leaves of the trees that line the edge of our backyard are not exactly all green. Their color diversity is also to behold. There are all kinds of shades of green—and not just from tree to tree, but from leaf to leaf also. I also find it amazing that I can climb every tree with just my gaze. It’s as if I can firmly fasten my sight on one leaf, branch, or tree, and slowly Tarzan my way to another one of my choosing—by just shifting my gaze. Following the sways and swings of the branches and their leaves with my gaze, I can also tell from which direction the wind is blowing. The same color diversity seems to also apply to the grass that is in the yard. Patches of dark, grayish, yellowish, and clear green seem to freely and randomly alternate.

I am grateful for what my eyes see—the beauty that I can behold—and the beauty that I know surrounds me but that my systems are not wired to behold. Like the very small, light-reflecting thread of a spider web that I can only see when I angle myself just right, I know that a lot of beauty is beyond appreciation by the naked eye.

I am in awe of the act of noticing, the way my awareness follows my attention. In other words, what I train my attention on—i.e., what I choose to be present with—determines what I end up perceiving—how our nervous systems interpret the raw sensations that inundate our senses. I am grateful for eventually learning to notice myself—as both a physical object placed in a 3-D space surrounded by the volume of the air I displaced when I sat down and as the beholder, doing the noticing. I am grateful for the realization that our senses are but different input interfaces through which sound, light, pressure, and temperature signals pass. Our organs seem to have some sort of signal modulator and converter systems that convert those incoming signals into messages that get communicated to our nervous systems. Our nervous system seems to be designed to receive those signals, process them, and interpret them as the multitude of experiences that we take in every second of every day.

Finally, I am grateful for the insight that nothing is as it seems at first glance. At first glance or encounter, our brains just render the quickest and easiest representation of the object of our glance. The longer we hold our gaze or attune to the object with our senses, the more our brains—slowly but surely—render the object with more and better resolution in our minds.

The more and longer we attend to the realities around and inside us, the more and longer we attune to the signals that our multiple senses bring us, the better and closer we get to experiencing the objects of our attention fully—the realities around and inside us—in their full glory, beauty, and wonder.

If you read this far, what will you fully attend to next? How long will you attune your senses? How long will you hold the objects to see their beauty in your eyes? Whatever you choose, you will be well served by remembering that the longer we attend and attune with intention, the more we reinforce the foundations of our inner home and illuminate it with beautiful lighting. As they say, there is no place like home, indeed.

I've been working on a book in my free time titled Home Near Me: A Journey To Belonging. What you just read is the epilogue. Inspired by Jordan Peterson's video on The Power of Writing, I decided to practice and improve my writing skills.

Would you be open to giving me feedback on the manuscript once it's ready?

(1) According to scientific research on pheromones, each one of us has a unique signature of body odor—as unique as our DNA. According to Wikipedia, pheromones are chemicals capable of acting like hormones outside the body of the secreting individual, to affect the behavior of the receiving individuals. These pheromones supposedly play a huge part in who we decide to climb in bed with more than most of us know or realize. Consider this fact: there are some people you just can’t—biologically speaking—be attracted to sexually—because of their pheromones, i.e., natural body odor. And the spookiest, but still coolest, fact is that all of this low-key swipe left/right based on how people smell goes on under the radar of our conscious awareness. In other words, our nose might be nudging us this or that way without our ever knowing a thing. For more about pheromones, check out the work of John and Julie Gottman, both PhDs, coming from their “Love Lab.” My favorite of their books is The Man’s Guide To Women: Scientifically Proven Secrets from the “Love Lab” About What Women Really Want.