Yuggen - not a brand of Nordic Yoghurt

Thanks to everyone who read last week's post. Here is something completely different- zooming out on life for a moment.

“To watch the sun sink behind a flower clad hill. To wander on in a huge forest without thought of return. To stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands. To contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds…” ~Zeami Motokiyo

Yuggen is “An awareness of the universe that triggers such an emotional response that it is too deep for words.

This is a concept that was presented to me in my daily calm (from Calm meditation app- it’s awesome.)

We don’t have a word for it in English; that feeling you get when you look at a vast starry night and suddenly realise how incredible that we are on this Earth that spins at 1000 miles per hour and is that is orbiting around the sun at about 30km per second, and doesn’t even mess up our hair.* And how massive this Earth is but compared to the Universe it’s a tiny speck. You feel such a sense of wonder you can’t describe it so you feel Yuggen.

Domou Arigato Mr Robato, and the rest of Japan for it’s awesome words and concepts.

I felt Yuggen several times in Adelaide. Nights spent in the Ute in rural S.A blanketed by the stars, and waking to see a huge swarm of ants working together to move a crumb to their hole. We went snorkeling around the reef at Point Noarlunga, and got to explore all the little nooks and crannies and fish of different varieties in their schools hanging about. A week on, it feels somewhat distant.

I guess this concept fits into the category of “things I remind myself of when things get overwhelming.” Our minds love being distracted, and have been for a very long time. Socrates was around when the greek alphabet was being developed. He was sure that now people were writing things down it would diminish the mind, distracted us with an excess of information, weaken the memory and recall as necessitated by the oral tradition, and over-simplified the complexity, flow, and development of ideas that happens in dialogue, his preferred form of communication. I wonder how he would react to know that our attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 before smart phones then reduced to 8 seconds in 2016.

What does that have to do with Yuggen? Well, I am going to try and divert my 8 second attention span to the bigger picture where possible. To look up or out at a view and think “How great thou art.”

8 seconds of one’s day to do that is still something, and in the words of Flight of the Conchords- “Two seconds in heaven are better than one second in heaven.”

Jj

*That line is kind of taken from Tim Minchin’s song “Not Perfect.” You can watch him sing it here.