Experience Vs. Reward

This episode was inspired by Mark Nepo's "The Book of Awakening" & the recognition of how often the joy of what we do is obscured by the desire to get something out of it. Some reward without which it's unworthy of our time and attention. How often are we bored or anxious because we have the sense that we don't want to be doing what we're doing. In fact, we're only doing it because we have to or because there's something we'll attain once we get it over with? What if reward = experience?

Please note: This track may include some explicit language.

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Welcome,

Fellow travelers,

On this human journey to this episode of the Wake the Fuck Up podcast.

My name is still Tiffany Andre Smires and today I want to talk about something that I recently read in an incredible book.

So for anyone that's not heard of this book or this person,

Hopefully this invitation changes your life just as much as it's changed mine.

The book is called The Book of Awakening and it's written by a man named Mark Nepo.

And from what I understand of Mark,

He was diagnosed with a life threatening illness and moved through it in such a way that the sense that I have is that he very and quite radically,

Viscerally woke up to what it means to really be fully human.

I love The Book of Awakening because it's little tiny pieces of wisdom that we can read every single day,

Less than a page.

So obviously there are 365 tidbits in here.

And I'd like to read to you one that's called The Life of Experience.

So often we anticipate a reward for the uncovering of truth.

For effort,

We expect money and recognition.

For sacrifice and kindness,

We secretly expect acceptance and love.

For honesty,

We expect justice.

But as we all know,

The life of experience unfolds with a logic all its own.

And very often,

Effort is seen and kindness is embraced and the risk of truth is held as the foundation of how humans relate.

However,

The reward for breathing is not applause,

But air.

And the reward for climbing is not a promotion,

But new sight.

And the reward for kindness is not being seen as kind,

But the electricity of giving that keeps us alive.

It seems the closer we get to the core of all being,

The more synonymous the effort and its reward.

Now this is about half of the entry for,

Interestingly,

January 14th.

But I wanted to use this as the foundation of our conversation today because when I read it and since January 14th,

I've seen the way that this belief subtly infuses into just about every moment of being alive.

Especially because we live in a time and a place where we really are doing and accomplishing tasks just about every minute of the day.

And I think if we look at the tasks that we orient to completing throughout the day,

It's generally because we actually do expect there to be some reward on the other end of it.

Now even if that reward is just marking it off the to-do list and the sense of accomplishment that comes by getting things done.

And maybe we'll start there,

Right?

Because this is something that I think drives me,

It drives my wife and my son and a lot of people that I know that when we sit down in the morning and make our to-do list,

There's something really palpable and exciting about the moment that we get to cross something off,

Right?

And so there's a real beauty,

I think,

To even being able to find joy in just the act of marking something off of your to-do list.

But I think Mark Nepo invites us to something even more beautiful and deep here that's being missed if what we're looking for is the reward at the end of the task of marking it off our list.

I mean,

How many people miss that reward,

Right?

But even if that's what we're seeking,

We're missing the reward of actually being alive to the doing,

To the being present to whatever it is that in the future we end up marking off.

So maybe we can play with this just a little bit more.

What do I mean?

Well,

One day I found myself in the midst of vacuuming my home,

Right?

And I noticed that I was vacuuming really efficiently,

Which is great,

But at the same time I had the anxious energy in my body of wanting to be done,

Right?

I was ready,

If you will,

For the accomplishment at the end of my task of being able to say,

Hey,

I got that done today,

Right?

And this is something I do at the end of my days as well,

Maybe all of us do.

Like what did I accomplish today before I go to bed?

Can I feel proud of myself for the day that I've had?

But what I realized in this instant of vacuuming efficiently was that I was anxious and uncomfortable in one moment just so I could feel the anticipation of the reward in another.

So the question I ask myself is,

Well,

What does it look like to actually enjoy this moment for what it is?

What if I vacuumed because my purpose was vacuuming,

Not because my purpose was the rewarding feeling of marking vacuuming off my list.

So what did I do?

I slowed down.

And as I slowed down vacuuming,

I felt the weight of the vacuum in my hand.

I could actually see the dirt coming up off of my floor being cleaned as I was vacuuming.

And the next maybe 15 minutes that I vacuumed was this immense sense of joy,

Of connectedness and of happiness.

And then the beauty is the reward of crossing it off the list didn't feel any less incredible,

But it felt enhanced by how much the experience itself was sufficient unto itself.

In a way,

The marking it off the list became yet another task or doing in which I allowed myself to be immersed.

So I find this idea to be really incredible.

And when I read the piece about kindness,

Right,

And the act of being kind,

That the reward for kindness is the feeling of being kind.

It's the electricity of giving as Mark Nepo says it,

Right?

And in reading that,

I thought about a relationship that I have that's kind of a relationship of necessity,

If you will.

And there are frequent moments inside of this relationship where I feel put out or frustrated because I spend so much time working to be kind and compassionate and considering this other person's perspective and making sure that they feel valued and seen and heard and that they know that they are just as important to me as I am to myself.

And then I find myself in these moments where I don't feel that reciprocated,

Right?

And in those moments,

I can hear as I read that Mark Nepo excerpt,

I could hear that voice in my head that says,

I'm kind to you.

So I deserve kindness in return.

And I was struck in reading that passage by what a state of confusion I found myself in.

That if the reason I'm being kind is because I expect kindness in return,

That's a really fucking selfish act.

And in an interesting way,

The recognition of this invites us to be selfish,

But in a completely different way.

It invites us to be selfish in the recognition that being kind feels good.

If I think about this relationship and I think about the times where I was unkind,

I can actually feel the hurt in my own chest.

But when I think about the times that I was kind and compassionate,

That I took the moment to care for this other person who may or may not be in need,

I feel proud.

I can feel the sense of connectedness in my own heart.

So why must there be this expectation of reward for behavior when in essence the reward is in the action,

In the doing,

In the being present to what's actually happening and what's here?

And I don't know if this will resonate for every single person right away.

I think this is one of the aspects of what I hope to offer in this podcast that as I've said before,

I really don't want anyone to trust anything I say,

To just take it at face value.

I want you to take these ideas,

Implement them into your own life,

Experiment and test them and find out what's true for you through your own experience.

And I think this is a beautiful example of one of those places where you're probably going to call bullshit until you actually feel this for yourself.

And it's like if you think about any of the most incredible moments of your life,

What do every single one of them contain?

They contain the richness of our own attention and awareness.

We aren't anywhere else in that moment.

We're not thinking about our to-do list.

We're not ruminating about the past or the future.

We are right fucking there,

Taking it all in.

For me,

I think about music festivals.

And just the moment that I step through the gate in the festival,

My energy and my mindset changes.

When I hear the first note drop through the speakers or I turn around and see the smile on 60,

000 people's faces,

You can't help but be overwhelmed by the beauty of what's occurring in that moment.

But the fucking incredible fact,

My dears,

Is that that can exist in every moment.

I think I want to leave it to another podcast episode to talk about why it can be so hard to connect to everyday moments,

Quote unquote,

As just as meaningful and valuable and important as,

Say for me,

Going to a music festival or on meditation retreat.

The mundaneness,

The averageness or the usualness of experience often makes it really hard to immerse and to stay present and to consider something valuable.

But the incredible thing is that when we actually slow down and we say to ourselves,

This moment is worth my time,

That just by doing that,

The moment actually becomes rich with color,

Texture,

Smell,

Vibrancy,

Lightness.

We can be connected to absolutely anything.

And if meditation has taught me anything,

It's really taught me that.

I mean,

Sitting still on a meditation retreat for seven to ten hours a day doing,

Quote unquote,

Doing absolutely nothing but sitting and breathing and letting my awareness take in all that's happening and never in my life having felt more peaceful,

More fucking joyous.

I mean,

It's unfathomable by common conversation to actually buy into the fact,

But I fucking mean it,

You guys.

I have never been happier than sitting still and meditation,

Tapping into or coming alive to or unraveling all of the barriers and the walls to actually being in that unconditioned space of wholeness,

Of oneness,

Of fucking connected to everything.

Just to be in this human body,

This incarnation,

This moment of being alive carries so much goodness in it.

And yes,

I forget.

I forget all the time.

I forget because I feel like I'm running through my life.

And as we run,

It's like when we watch a movie and you can tell that they shot the car scene in a standing still car and just moved the,

You know,

What would you call it,

Like the paper or something behind the car and it's just a bunch of blurred colors,

Right?

I think that's a beautiful articulation for what tends to happen as we move through our days that we're so focused on the reward that we forget that if we slow down,

The reward is in the beauty of having the richness of all of this to experience every single moment.

We slow down and now all of a sudden the colors outside the window are not just a bunch of blurred unrecognizable shapes,

But the beautiful petals of flower.

As we slow down,

We let each action be the reward unto itself instead of constantly looking for what I'm getting out of everything I'm doing.

And I think it's unfortunate that we live in a time and a space where everything is about what we get for what we do,

Right?

Like even as I think about my son and his schoolwork,

It's a challenge because he's forced to sit down and work on these assignments that of course he wouldn't give to himself if he had the choice.

And inside of that I can hear in the way he describes things that he's not doing it for himself,

He's doing it because he has this sense that he has to.

And I wish that I could teach him at 12 years old that if we just changed our minds,

If he decided in a single instant that he was going to do this work for himself instead of anyone else,

That the way we experience it changes.

And I'll give you another example.

My wife and I recently decided to take her bakery business and make it a mom and mom's,

Which I'm so excited about.

It's been a dream of ours to eventually open a bakery,

Maybe have the bakery downstairs and we live upstairs and waking up early in the morning together and drinking our coffee as we begin to open the shop and she bakes.

And I think we're really on the road to doing that now.

When COVID hit,

She couldn't have anybody else working with her.

And so from March of last year until really January of this year,

I was working with her,

But I had in my mind that I was just helping and supporting.

In January,

We began working together.

It became kind of our business.

We were doing it together.

I was no longer helping.

In a way,

It became mine.

And I could feel the very first day I sat down to do the exact same tasks that I had been doing since March that my investment in them felt different.

I was no longer doing them as a gift to someone else,

Inside of which I think there's the expectation that the reward is being seen as,

Look what I'm doing for you.

Right?

And instead,

Now I was doing it just for the sake of doing it because it was for me.

And there was a really profound sense of joy,

Of happiness,

Of connection and ownership inside of that doing now.

It wasn't for anyone else.

It was just for me.

It wasn't for a reward,

Not for the money,

Not for anything other than the value that I felt in doing work with love.

So I think maybe with this playfulness,

We'll leave it here for today.

But I really want to encourage and remind that the playfulness of taking this out of this recording and inputting it into your life and finding what's real for you.

And any moment that you catch yourself doing something because you expect there to be a reward at the end of the tunnel,

Pause and ask yourself what it might be like to do it just because it's worth it to do it.

Let the reward be the experience itself.

If you can think about the times in your life that you seek out experiences because those experiences are the reward.

They are rewarding.

We reward ourselves and our lives with experiences,

Vacations,

All of this that we do sort of innately speaks to the way we have the possibility of living in every single moment.

If we let every experience be the reward,

How would we feel at the end of the day,

Halfway through the day,

The moment we wake up and let the light come into our eyes?

Even that moment has the potential of being a reward unto itself.

All right,

My dears.

Thank you so much for being with me today for exploring this curiosity of reward versus experience versus life being life as it's being lived in this vessel of our humanity.

I hope that you've enjoyed today's curiosity and as always,

I look deeply forward to seeing you next time.

Reviews

The genuine experience is the reward. I’ve felt that feeling, but not often enough. 🙏