The Pleasures of Existence

An Appreciation of Everyday Life

A while back I was having lunch with an old friend who had been going through a depressing time, feeling discouraged and deflated, especially over his non-existent love life.

“What’s especially frustrating,” he said, “is the fact that there’s just no pleasure in my life anymore—none. It’s been 15 years since I’ve had sex. With someone other than myself, that is.”

I could empathize, especially since my own romantic life hadn’t exactly been something to write home about. Reflecting for a moment on his comments, I didn’t want to simply suggest ways he could distract himself or paper over those heavy feelings, since I know there can be value in learning from those, too.

But I couldn’t help but notice that, for him, pleasure equated almost exclusively with sex—and that was that. What was ironic about all of that for me was the fact that as we sat in that nice restaurant, he was eating what seemed to be a delicious meal—a meal that any starving person in the world would have probably given their eye teeth for. So I asked him, “What about that meal you’re eating right now? Do you find any pleasure in that?”

He seemed slightly caught off guard by the question, and said, “Well yeah...there’s that.”

Not to compare a great meal with great sex, let alone a great, sustained relationship, but I do think there’s a point to be made here. In the process of associating “pleasure” so exclusively with just one or two activities in life, I think it’s easy to overlook the many avenues of pleasure we move through daily, often without even knowing it.

This is something I’ve struggled with throughout much of my own life, since I know I have the tendency to take much for granted in my daily experience—that is, until something comes along which points that out for me. Like unexpectedly being deprived of an ordinary luxury like running water or indoor plumbing; or seeing someone else do without those simple things I casually take for granted. It’s led me to make a more concerted effort to turn this around and look at things in my world a bit more closely. With that in mind, I thought I’d share a list of some of the “tricks” I sometimes employ for doing just that.

The pleasure of eating

A few years ago, I watched a film about the life of critic Roger Ebert and the struggles he faced in the wake of throat and mouth cancer. Because of his condition, he had to take in nourishment through a tube in his throat. That was a sobering thought for me. Try to imagine never being able to taste a simple meal with your mouth or tongue again. I can’t speak for anyone else, but food has probably been the key source of comfort and pleasure throughout my entire life (as a result, fasting has never come very easy for me); I frankly don’t know how well I’d deal with it were I to find myself in Ebert’s shoes for any period of time. Though I may be less aware in these respects than I’d really like, I try to never take for granted even the smallest bites of food I consume during an ordinary day.

The pleasure of breathing

As mentioned previously, during high school I sustained a back injury that put me in a cast for several months. The first night after the doctors applied the plaster strips, the cast constricted as it dried and the effect left me feeling like I was gradually suffocating, bit by bit. It was a terrifying experience (offset somewhat by the heavy-duty painkillers the nurse administered late that night). By the next day I was considerably better, but that first evening was akin to torture, and made me appreciate oxygen more than any book or lecture could ever have. Since then, I make a point of taking a few moments now and then throughout the day to slow down and savor the experience of every breath, if not every molecule of oxygen.

The pleasure of drinking water

Have you ever spent hours or even days in a hot, dry climate with no access to water, even to the point where you grew concerned about your survival? If so, then you’ll likely recall what an amazing sensation it was when you finally had access to that first drink of water. I’ve had that experience a few times over the years, and since then whenever I turn on the tap I make a point of feeling gratitude for the extraordinary gift of running water—while also taking a moment to appreciate the remarkable taste of water itself. Did I say “taste of water”? Indeed. Strange, really; water supposedly has “no taste” and yet it has the most remarkable taste of all—when you’re truly thirsty!

The pleasure of seeing

My mother went blind during the last years of her life, as a result of a medical mistake made during surgery. The tragic irony was, she went in to the clinic for a routine cataract procedure specifically designed to improve her eyesight for the sake of her painting, a hobby she had picked up in her later years. Taking care of her during that period made me realize more than before what an amazing gift it was just to see—to take in the sights of nature, appreciating works of art, beholding the night sky, reading the expressions on peoples’ faces, simply maneuvering through the world every day, and just generally appreciating the beauty and extraordinary complexity of life brought about by those trillions of photons swirling through my eyes and brain at every moment.

The pleasure of music

Parallel to my mother’s situation, I had a friend in childhood who was deaf, and it allowed me to see first-hand how painful and isolating that was for him not only in social situations but because of how he could never enjoy the music that was so important to many of us at that age. He was never able to experience the incredible thrill we had on hearing each new album by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, or Dylan; nor could he ever enjoy the transcendent strains of Debussy or Ravel I personally grew to love during those years, among others.

Despite how absolutely pervasive it is, from songs on the radio to jingles on TV commercials, music is a genuinely mysterious phenomenon in the strange way that sonic proportions are able to evoke such deep and complex emotional states in us, and seemingly transporting us to different worlds. Yet it’s a phenomenon completely denied those without the miraculous gift of hearing.

The pleasure of walking

I remember being deeply touched by an interview with a paraplegic once, in which the fellow said, “Before my accident I never dreamt there might come a day when I’d actually feel jealous just watching someone else walk across the room.” That was his Mount Everest, apparently—simply being able to stand up and walk a few feet. He knew better than anyone else how walking is one of life’s greatest pleasures, whether it be for hiking across a majestic landscape or simply traveling from one room to the next.

The pleasure of the outdoors

During the mid-1980s, I was asked to give a talk to some prisoners at (the now-decommissioned) Joliet Penitentiary in Illinois. I was initially nervous, since I’d never been inside of a prison before; yet it turned out to be a great experience for me in several ways. One of those was the fact that the group of the 70 or so prisoners I spoke to seemed deeply appreciative having someone from the outside come in to talk with them. But it was also meaningful for me because of how the experience made me more appreciative of the ordinary freedoms I take for granted, not just in having control over my time and actions but in being able to simply go outdoors and just walk around. I should elaborate.

At one point the prison employee who hosted my talk took me out for a walk around the prison grounds, where I saw various prisoners milling around, generally in various groups. I didn’t think too much about the situation until we came upon a particular handful of tattooed men walking towards us from the other direction. As we passed them by, my host whispered, “Don’t look ‘em in the eye—look down...” I did as he suggested, and afterward he explained that the one thing you don’t want to do on these grounds was make eye contact with prisoners you’re not directly allied with. Needless to say, I don’t have to worry about such things when I leave my own home and walk around my neighborhood, or go to the store, and I would imagine the majority of my readers don’t either. Either way, it’s a freedom and a pleasure I’ve grown to appreciate particularly these last few years, in the wake of dealing with certain health challenges that have made long walks a somewhat more infrequent one for me.

The pleasure of sleeping in a bed

I’ve been fortunate to have only experienced “homelessness” for two days out of my entire life, when I found myself stranded in a foreign country with no money or shelter, after having my wallet stolen. Which is to say I’ve never really been “homeless”—not in the way genuinely homeless people experience. But what surprised me, even for that very short time, was how vulnerable and even depressed the experience made me feel. It was just long enough to make me empathize with those forced to resort to sleeping on the ground or on cold cement, park benches, or in makeshift cardboard boxes, be they refugees or just men or women down on their luck. It certainly led me to appreciate simply having a bed to sleep in, one that’s housed in a secure space where I didn’t have to worry about extremes of temperature, vermin, or violent attacks in the middle of the night.

Then there is the experience of sleep itself—easily one of life’s greatest pleasures. I remember driving cross country with my friend Bill Hogan while in college, from Chicago to San Francisco. Because of a deadline my friend had to meet, we had to reach our destination in no more than 48 hours, but because I didn’t know how to drive my friend’s stick shift back then, I had to stay awake in order to keep him awake that entire time. Including the time spent getting ready before the trip to meet up with him, by the end of the trip I’d been awake a total of almost 60 hours. It’s impossible for me to describe how blissful it was when I finally had the chance to lie down on a bed in a seedy motel room and fall asleep.

The pleasure of emotions

What do I mean by that? I no longer recall the title, but I remember seeing a science fiction movie or TV show once where a mechanical robot wanted badly to know what it felt like to experience human emotions—even the seemingly unpleasant ones, since even that was a realm of experience the robot was unable to know. We take our emotions for granted, and sometimes even wish we didn’t have them. Yet how dry and empty would our lives be without them? While the mystical traditions enjoin us to control our emotions and lift our states of consciousness, that doesn’t mean the goal is to become robots! I often think back to a comment Goswami Kriyananda once made: “Everyone is trying to find God when they haven’t even found their humanness yet.” There is value in aspiring to the spiritual heights, it’s true, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of completely bypassing the value—and beauty—of our everyday existence, in all its facets.

The pleasure of thinking

One of my childhood friends, Steve, had a serious motorcycle accident in his mid-20s, which left him seriously brain damaged. For years afterwards, he was unable to string words together to form even simple sentences. He struggled mightily to communicate, but eventually would just explode with primal sounds at the top of his lungs, out of sheer frustration. For most of us, our brains run like reasonably well-oiled machines; but if you’ve ever watched someone like my friend Steve, or experienced mental or brain issues yourself, you’ll know what an extraordinary thing it is to simply think and communicate your thoughts clearly, or understand those conveyed to you by others.

Above and beyond ordinary thought, there is that extraordinary faculty of thinking we call imagination. By means of it, we can create entire worlds in our minds, travel to distant lands or dimensions, reimagine our future self, conceive beautiful works of art or music, or call up or reconfigure memories from our past. These, too, are gifts afforded us by those entities we so casually refer to as “thoughts.”

Last but not least, the simple pleasure of existence itself

When I was in my 20s, I happened to watch a documentary on public television about capital punishment, and it included a brief sequence showing the execution of a well-dressed man somewhere in the Middle East. He was led to the scaffold, and when they tried to place the noose around his neck, he repeatedly—and desperately—kept moving his head around in hope of dodging the rope. It was a deeply sad thing to see, because he obviously knew he couldn’t forestall his fate forever, yet was fighting to grab even just a few more seconds of life. The sequence cut off right before it showed his demise, fortunately, but it was just enough to illustrate just how much most of us really want to live—however messed up our lives may seem on their surface. We may not normally think of simply existing as something inherently “pleasurable” in itself, yet to a person ascending the scaffold, or to almost anyone facing their possible demise, whatever the reason, it rapidly becomes apparent just how meaningful and wonderful this simple fact is.

I’ll take it one critical step farther and invite you to consider the following thought experiment. Imagine you had divine powers and could have offered that man on the scaffold a choice: on the one hand, he could have access to the greatest pleasures in the world, including the greatest food, sex, and beautiful stimuli of all types possible, but it would be on the condition that it would last for just one week, after which his life would end. The other choice would be to not have any of those extraordinary pleasures to enjoy, but he could go free at the end of that week, he’d be granted a reprieve to live out the rest of his natural life as he pleased.

Which of those options do you suppose he would go for? I think it’s safe to say it would be the latter one. That’s simply because as great as all those other pleasures may be, they’re completely outstripped by what may be the greatest pleasure of all: simply existing.

This has been excerpted from my book So, What Am I Doing Here, Anyway? (The Wessex Astrologer, 2024).

Ray Grasse is an author, astrologer, and photographer living in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, most recently In the Company of Gods (Inner Eye, 2024). His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.