Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example—
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
— Nâzim Hikmet, On Living

Hikmet famously went to prison for his beliefs, making him a poet to rally for. Free speech is available to many of us, but not all of us. What would you write or say that is worth spending your life in prison for? For those of us who are free, it’s hard to imagine much of anything save our most precious relationships and our very freedom. To just shut up and hope bad things go away is no way to live. Whether we’re in an actual prison or not, we are imprisoned by our awareness of what we are deprived of. Knowing this, look around and appreciate what it is we aren’t deprived of. Awareness has its rewards too.

Imagine being a poet free from those who had imprisoned him, free at last to be aware of the larger world. Imagine what we might see and feel and be awed by just moving through the world. Some of Hikmet’s poetry is just that. Maybe that’s why he was popular in his time—he wrote about what awed him after missing out on it for years.

Of course, we don’t need prison time ourselves to be awed, we just need to pay more attention to the miracle unfolding before us. That is awareness to aspire towards. That’s living in a world that seems frustrating and maybe a little ordinary at times but has magic just the same.

Look around, look around
At how lucky we are to be alive right now
— Lin-Manuel Miranda & Phillipa Soo, That Would Be Enough

What are we waiting for? We ought to reach out and see where bold action might take us. We ought to be more awake and alive while there’s time for such things. We ought to be more like that squirrel, not so worried about what is beyond or above the here and now, and instead actively living in it. Wonder at all of it, if you will. I’ll be right there next to you. How lucky are we to be alive right now?