Have you watched a young child playing? Or can you remember what was going on inside your head as a child? I’ve done both. I do the first regularly because I have young children. And the second because when I really relax I remember what it was like to be a child.

If I lie down and look up into a blue sky and listen to the sound of a distant airplane, it invariably brings up a memory from my childhood. Why? Because as we grow up we stop being fascinated by ordinary things. So when I do occasionally take pleasure simply in what’s around me, it reminds me of the last time I did that: when I was a child. This is what children do. They live in the miracle of existence. Everything is new and fascinating. They can enjoy the wrapping as much as the present . . . a leaky faucet as much as a beautiful lake . . . the smell of rain falling on dry concrete as much as the smell of baking bread.

There are no rules about what’s good or bad, what’s better than something else, or what’s worth it. There’s little discernment: there are just things coming in . . . and most of them are fascinating.

As we grow up we learn how to discern, discriminate and filter out. And we tend to filter out the ordinary things in favor of the extraordinary and the unusual. In fact, much of the time we’re so lost in thoughts of the past or worries about the future that we don’t have much time for any kind of appreciation. But when we do ‘appreciate,’ it tends to be of the things that adults think are worth appreciating: tasty things, beautiful things, interesting things and expensive things.

At some point the feeling of wooden boards under our feet, the sound of a toilet flushing in a room upstairs, the feeling of wind against your face . . . these all disappear off the list of things that we should appreciate. Instead we spend lots of money to go on vacation, or go to the movies or go out for a meal in order to flex our appreciation muscles.

When we say F**k It to anything, then the meanings start to crumble. As the things that matter lose their meaning, then suddenly the world opens up again. Without the discrimination and discernment we learned as we were growing up, every single thing has the potential to be appreciated. Everything is beautiful.

If this happens all of a sudden it can be mind-blowing (almost literally). And this is what happens to a lot of people who have apparently ‘awakened.’ When you start seeing the beauty in absurd things, you know you are starting to lose your mind. Or at least the mind that has learned to see meaning in only a limited range of things.

See each moment as having infinite potential for beauty. We tend to drag all our judgments, conditioning and boundaries from the past into the present. And it squashes that moment into something very limited. If you leave some of those judgments behind and just see things as a young child might see them, you start to get a beautiful feeling. It’s a feeling of relief but mixed with some kind of longing, too. The longing rises up from a very deep part of you that remembers what it was like to see things like this all the time.

When we say F**k It we turn the clock back. We unlearn meaning and smash the things that we have come to think mattered.

We regress to a more natural state where things don’t mean much but they’re all just so extraordinarily beautiful.