The eye is the most active muscle in our entire body. While most parts of the body require time and attention to be at their full potential, the eye is ready for us 24/7, feeding us rapid-fire information without any conscious effort. The average blink lasts for 1/10 of a second. The average eye is about 1 inch across and weighs less than a quarter of an ounce. Yet the information that is being passed through these 1-inch marvels requires half our brain to process. In short, we exert a lot of effort to interpret what we’re seeing. It takes half our brain to even discern what it is exactly we’re looking at. It takes more than half our brain to discern if what we’re seeing has any value to us. If we discern what we’re seeing has some value to us, it takes even more of our brain to help us figure how much value it has, and what we’re willing to do to acquire this value.
I’ll give you a concrete example of this. Jennifer and I are looking at houses, and we find a house we’re interested in, and we are curious to get it appraised. The appraiser comes and does a thorough appraisal. I receive a report with dozens of pictures of the exterior and interior.
I see surface analysis of the materials used in construction, even surface analysis of the soil and the possibility of flooding. I read an analysis of the current housing market in Youngstown, and a brief analysis of school districts and comparable properties in the area with their list prices at closing, which vary widely. I’m skimming through these 20 plus pages of detailed analysis to satisfy my curiosity about one question: How much is it worth?
The appraisal says: Due to the age of the house, the varying list prices of comparable houses in the market within this neighborhood, and due to the fact that most homebuyers in this area don’t follow market appraisals in terms of buying or selling, we cannot offer a definitive market value. Can appraisers do that? Yes, yes, they can. All the though analysis leads to further doubt about the true value of what is being perceived. My first thought was this is the most honest appraisal in the world. All the facts if you look closely contradict as much as support one another, and who is to say really, how much a home is worth.
I’ll give you another example. A friend of mine was trying to figure out what he should do to make a living. The first place he started was trying to figure out how much his time is worth. He knows this a very deep question with practical implications. So, he thought about it. He knows that time is relatively short and precious. We don’t know much of it we’ll get. And each hour once it’s lived, we know we’ll never get back. We don’t usually live our day thinking this, but the closer we look, we see this is true. Time is fleeting, precious, and limited. With all this in mind, how much is one hour of your time worth? My friend pondered on this. Given the preciousness of the time we’re given, how much is 1 hour of it worth? His first answer was $10,000 dollars. If someone paid him $10,000 dollars for an hour of his time, maybe he’d consider it. Then he thought a little more. The more he thought, the more he realized $10,000 dollars was way too low for something as precious and fleeting as 1 hour of his limited life. He is also realistic.
He knew no one would pay him $10,000 for an hour of his time, and since that would be low price anyway, he decided he would only work for free. He would live by donations, gifts, because no one could possibly afford his time.
Beauty and value go hand in hand. We find things beautiful that we ascribe the most value to. We find things less beautiful, if in our minds, we ascribe they are worth less. Beauty in this sense tends to operate on a comparison model. When we ask ourselves how much something is worth, often we’re clueless. We look for comparisons, some kind of cultural analysis to discern how much beauty is in something. We use comparison to discern how much something is worth. It’s very simplistic, and I think this comparison model leads to a shallow understanding of beauty, and it leaves us squandering the things that are possibly the most valuable while chasing what we’ve learned has high value.
What is the most valuable thing in your life?
It depends on who’s asking the question. If an appraiser or an attorney is asking you this question, you might be able to list your most valuable asset or set of assets.
But we’re in a church. You’re here spending a precious hour of your limited life, so I won’t waste your time. I know how precious it is. I think your being here is the most valuable choice you could make. It’s not just a sales pitch. I mean it. Without this kind of space for reflection and depth, within a culture that hands us simplistic measuring tools, the danger is we can spend our whole life not ever knowing how much it was really worth. This one hour is an investment, to give you a very important choice. The choice is this: to be able to make your own assessment of what is valuable to you, and to allow your life to support those values.
But back to the question: What is the most valuable thing in your life? I think when it comes down to it, the most valuable thing in our lives are relationships with people we love - our family, our partners, our pets. As we mature, I think we can add time with ourselves on that list, which is another kind of relationship, based on love.
We’re both complex and simple creatures. I think we are easily confused about what to love, what to dedicate our time and energy to, because we’re confused about how much things are really worth. We don’t know yet for ourselves about the value of basic things: like our time, our home, our own life. We are tempted to do comparison in an attempt to get concrete answers, but these concrete answers are never concrete. They are made up. They are made up, and we either buy in to appraisals that are made up, or make up our own.
You can’t compare Youngstown to anywhere in the world. It’s incomparable. You can try. You can look at real estate here and compare it to real estate in Big Sur, California, and you’ll see there is a great gap in terms of ascribed value. A house that is worth $60,000 dollars in Youngstown may be worth 2.5 million dollars in Big Sur. Why is this? It can be tempting to look at data for an answer to this question, but the answer to this question is not found in data. You can say it comes down to economics. You can say: “They have the ocean.”
These would all be true, but it’s not the truth. Why is there such a large gap in terms of value? Simply because people say collectively, I think there is more value here.
When you get enough people who value a particular place, it’s not surprising, the value of a place rises. This is how gentrification works. A neighborhood that was once seen as undesirable suddenly becomes desirable by enough people, and housing prices rise. Personally, I find the housing market in Youngstown just right. I see the value of this place, and not just because it’s inexpensive in comparison. It’s because it’s beautiful.
Ascribing value to our life is that simple, and once we do it’s transformative. We can say any place we are - this is beautiful, and suddenly the place has value. Americans are constantly searching and competing for what we think has the most value, and we miss the most obvious indicators of value which are found in concepts no one can measure, concepts like home, love, freedom.
The proverb says that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whose eyes are we looking through?
There is nothing more powerful than ascribing beauty and value, just because we can. This ability is god-like. We can choose to look at all this as our own creation, and say with certainty and calm: “It is good.” Appraisals and comparisons are fine as far as they go, but they can never go far enough. All of this needs our own eye. It needs us to see it for what it really is: precious, incomparable, and fleeting. It’s a place we can call home. All of this can happen in a blink of an eye.
It has been a rainy June so far. When I first moved to Youngstown, I was told about 3 months in, that this place is always overcast. It’s funny, I never noticed it. Part of that is probably because I grew up in Oregon, so I don’t notice when it’s overcast or grey. It just feels familiar and kind of nice. This rainy June was like that for me. I found it surprising, and kind of lovely. I enjoy cool weather, and I’m also glad that the sun has decided to arrive. It’s nice to feel the sun shining after a period of rain and grey.
We had a picnic yesterday at Richard Brown out in their front yard facing Elm. It was a perfect day for a picnic. I met a local judge there, and she judged me in the blink of an eye. She said: “You are too young to be a minister. I don’t believe it.”
I think there’s a lovely truth in that though. I’ve often told people I’ve experienced my life as getting younger, not getting older. I think I was born an old man, and by my teen years I was middle aged, and now I’m in the bloom of youth, a youth that I somehow missed before.
Aging is funny like that. It’s in the eye of the beholder. My goal is to be a newborn baby, like Benjamin Button, if not physically, at least in spirit. When we know our value in the world, we can relax and enjoy who we are and where we are. When we’re chasing that elusive value in a world full of comparisons and appraisers, it takes a toll, and it makes us old before our time.
Part of recognizing beauty is letting go. It’s letting go, and making space for forgiveness. Gandhi famously said: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Gandhi was Hindu, and I always wondered if we he was thinking of the well-known idiom found in the Upanishads in 200 BCE: “Abiding in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go aimlessly hither and thither, like blind led by the blind.”
Living in a world of comparison and appraisers is the blind leading the blind. We think we are wise and learned by following expert opinion and research, but we are truly destined to become fools moving hither and thither.
There are many ways of seeing, the least of which is through our eyes. The most important way of seeing is with our mind-heart, a place where the two are connected, and offer us clarity in times of dissent and confusion. It allows us to use all our senses to apprehend the true value we seek.
It is a shame that the things we see every day often hold the least value for us. We only often know the value of something in its absence, or long overdue arrival. It’s a shame that we only know the value of the sun when it has been grey and rainy for so long. It’s too bad that when the sun is shining every day, we forget it, and fail to see it. But we do.
The eye forgets what it already knows, and only notices what is different, an aberration. Eyes draw on our memory to more accurately interpret and define what is in front of us.
Our memory bank are our collective stories and experiences, ready to be drawn on in the blink of an eye. It tells us what is right in front of us and where it should be situated in our lives. But we are not quite that mechanistic. The physical eye is not what gives us this world. It is not limited to our memory, to our sense of deprivation, or our boredom with seeing the same thing on such a regular basis. The eye of the beholder sees beyond the beholder, beyond the physical eye. It sees the true nature of what is in front of it: bright, luminous, and beyond comparison.
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