Diamonds at Your Feet

Jewels at Your Feet: A Walk Interrupted (0:00)

Brett Hill: Listening to The Mindful Coach with your host, Brett Hill, and in this episode, we’re going to be talking about jewels at your feet and portals to the real world. Hope you enjoy.

There’s a lot of stress going around these days, and for really good reason. That’s one of the reasons that, whenever the gods of weather and scheduling are harmonious and getting along, my wife and I try to get out and take a walk.

That’s exactly what we were doing this morning. Along the walk, we talk about whatever’s going on in our respective worlds, ranging from the tech bubble to the mystery of life, and the topic of the day was one that inspires so many of us: the inner workings of our own homeowners association, which probably ought to be its own Netflix miniseries. It’s way more involved than it ought to be.

There we are, walking along the sidewalk, engaged in all the profundity of nonprofit accounting details, and all of a sudden, I just stopped. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked straight down at my feet, at the ground. I was literally transfixed. I said, out loud, “Oh, wow.”

My wife, surprised, stopped, looked down to see what I was staring at, and she said, “Oh, wow.”

What had captured us both was something unexpectedly beautiful—nothing more or less than a wet leaf on the sidewalk. In many ways, it was just an ordinary leaf, but in the Pacific Northwest, where I live, the leaves can be quite large. This time of year, particularly after the windstorm that had swept through just yesterday, the sidewalk was glistening with leaves strewn about. At my feet was not just a gorgeous late-autumn leaf, but one capturing an exquisite moment in time. The leaf held these small globes of water—way too big to be called drops. It was a wonder that they held together. They were so large, and there were many of them sitting on the surface of this leaf at my feet.

I stared in amazement at these oversized crystal balls of water. The light was glistening through them and shining on the leaf beautifully because it was a gorgeous day. It was quite a vision—this mad intersection of autumn sunlight, rainstorms, and HOA planning.

I paused there for a long minute or two, taking in the experience. It was so simple, but even so, I had to train myself to see moments like this. And it’s so worth it. It’s added so much beauty to my life.

Stress, Choice, and Who You Want to Be (3:19)

Yes, we live in stressful times, and for that reason alone, moments like this are crucial to our well-being and our resilience. I sometimes call these moments diamonds at your feet because they’re like jewels all around you, right at your feet, just waiting for you to notice.

This isn’t just about stopping to smell the roses. It’s about connecting with something more substantial, more powerful, and more persistent than the stressors of our lives. We can’t change the politics or your health or the fact that maybe you’ve lost someone or some opportunity, but we can connect to the question: Who do I want to be, given the circumstances that I find myself in?

Imagine, for example, a dancer who’s in a car wreck—this happens because of someone else’s negligence—and as a result, she can no longer dance. She really worked hard—talented, gifted, expressive, beautiful, graceful—all gone. That whole life for her disappears in a moment due to someone else’s negligence. She can’t dance any longer. This tragic story happens way too often. People are impacted by events not of their doing. They are literal and true victims—victims of other people’s negligence or unconsciousness or poor decisions.

So what can you do? You can spend your entire life being upset and angry, pissed off and victimized, that what should have been yours was taken from you—and that would be true. But spending the next 50 years in that state, organized around feeling resentful every day for the rest of your life, does not change the fact that this occurred. It does not restore your future. All it does is trash the experience of the day you are having.

So the question becomes: Is that the life you would wish to have? You might say, “Well, no,” but you didn’t wish for this tragedy to befall you. That’s true. You didn’t wish for that. But it did, and now you have a choice—or I’m inviting you to consider your choices. You can’t change the facts of your circumstances, but you can have some authority over the quality of your experience.

Consider the possibility of our dancer connecting to the part of her that is artistic, expressive, graceful, and loves beauty—and letting that have a voice and expression in other ways. The part of you that wants to express, thrive, connect, and manifest something powerful and beautiful in the world—that part is what’s true and good. Connecting with that any way you can is going to feel like, yes. It just maybe can’t happen in the way that you would like because of something that happened to you or your circumstances, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.

We’ll continue with this after this brief message.

Creativity, Growth, and the Artist Within (7:57)

I’ve seen, for example, people who want to be musicians before they pick up an instrument. Some say, “I would like to write a song or play an instrument, but I need a better guitar. I need one that plays beautifully to match the beauty of my vision of what could be possible.” I wish them well and hope they find their way to express what they’re feeling. However, they’ve set before themselves the task of finding the perfect instrument before they have given expression to their creativity.

Compare that to another type of artist whose desire to create is so powerful that it doesn’t matter if they have teacups and spoons—they will create. The music comes pouring out of them, no matter the instrument at their disposal. That’s an artist. And you have something like that in you. I believe we all do. It might not be profound. It might not be the kind of thing that’s going to get you on a stage in front of people or create a career for you.

But we all want to thrive. We all want to grow. Every living thing has a way to grow and to thrive. A plant will turn toward the sun because it naturally is imbued with the capacity to sense the direction of the sun and turn toward it. Why? So it can grow—from a tiny seed to a mighty oak, or maybe from a tiny seed to a little blade of grass, not a mighty blade of grass, but a beautiful one nonetheless.

So the work is to find that core in you and to know that there is a connection to beauty, peace, and grace that cannot be quelled by the circumstances of the day. When you simply touch it, it rises in you as a foundational truth. Which of those worlds would you rather live in—the one where you’re angry and unhappy about what didn’t happen or shouldn’t have happened, or the one where you’re connected to something more powerful than the transient experiences of your life?

Examples of Resilience and Training Your Attention (11:05)

The world is full of examples like this. I was reminded of a powerful TED Talk by a snowboarder named Amy Purdy, who, at 19, lost both of her legs to meningitis. In her talk, she asks, “If your life were a book and you were an author, how would you want your story to go?” And she says, “If you ask me today if I would ever want to change my situation, I would have to say no, because my legs haven’t disabled me. If anything, they’ve enabled me.” That’s a very, very powerful place to be.

I’m not suggesting you have to be a saint or the Buddha or some transcendent soul. I’m suggesting that in our day-to-day lives, we are surrounded by things that are unjust and unfair. There is plenty of good reason to be upset and angry and feel disempowered, and yet, there are diamonds at our feet. There is a wet leaf on the sidewalk glistening in the sun with unbelievably large drops of water that are radiating “wow.” There are happy animals dancing down the street, just delighted to be outside—all of them a delight to behold. There are lovely embraces of people all around. There are birds flying gracefully through backlit skies of cloudy mornings, thousands of people every day welcoming new life into the world. Every moment, somewhere, the sun is cresting on a new day. Amazing. The depth and beauty of the world we live in is astounding.

So stop and look for it. These moments are simply waiting to be seen. Let yourself be informed by them. And I said, I had to train for this. I literally worked more than a year in a community of people who were practicing how to be somatically present—to notice what it feels like to walk through the world in a body, a body that’s connected not only to great suffering but to great beauty—and to have some authority over what you choose to hang out with. Not to escape the problems, but not to deny yourself the fact that it’s an incredibly amazing place to live on this planet.

Portals to Beauty and a Life Worth Living (14:05)

So when you encounter something lovely and simple that normally would just pass you by, let it stop you in your tracks and notice, because here’s a deeper truth: when you connect to a moment like that, you get really still inside. All the chatter just stops for a moment in time. That moment is not just noticing something nice; it’s a portal connecting you to beauty itself, to grace itself, to timelessness. And it’s the beauty in you recognizing the beauty in the world.

In that moment of communion, there are a few seconds of the most delicious peace, filled with a sense of connectedness to something so vast and large that it transcends our circumstances. That, to me, is the very essence of what it means to be alive and connected to a life worth living—a life where we can all thrive.

And what does the world need more than this? What would it do to our politics, to our organizations, to our relationships, to our businesses, if everyone in the room had experiences like this every day? And we can. We simply have to wish to, and that’s my hope. My hope for you and me and everyone on the planet is to have more beautiful moments. And the best way to have more beautiful moments is to simply notice the beauty right in front of you.

Blessings to you.