Don’t miss the sacredness of any moment...

…by wishing it was some other way.

“Moment to moment, I will notice my heart closing and try to open it back up.”

On a New Year’s Eve a number of years ago, my openhearted journey began with that resolution, and it would become my singular spiritual practice. Eighteen months later, we hit the road for our annual beach vacation. I thought my heart was wide open.

It was not…

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On our way out of town, I get outvoted three to one—Dunkin’ over Starbucks—and I proceed to throw a temper tantrum way down deep in my soul. We’re almost through Indiana before it quiets down. It’s the first sign I’m not as openhearted as I imagine.

I don’t see the sign.

Fourteen hours later, we arrive at my mother-in-law’s house in northern Delaware around bedtime, where we plan to spend the next day celebrating my wife’s grandfather’s ninety-fifth birthday. We call him Vuvu—Portuguese for grandpa. It will be the first time since he was twenty-one that he celebrates a birthday without his wife, who passed away the previous year.

The rest of us will try to make up for her absence, knowing we’ll fall terribly short.

The next morning, I get in the car to run some errands and see Marcus Mumford has released his first single as a solo artist. His band Mumford and Sons accounts for most of my favorite beach music. I’m instantly eager to hear this new song, imagining it will become the soundtrack for our week. I tap play. The song is a confessional piece about Mumford’s childhood sexual abuse.

Temper tantrum number two ensues.

You can’t listen to stories of abuse on the beach, I lament in a world-class fit of closed-hearted selfishness, jabbing at the stop button before the song can reach its second chorus. I scroll my library for a song about sunshine instead.

Temper tantrum two recedes more quickly than the first, so it’s even easier to overlook.

Later that day, after picking up Vuvu from his assisted living facility, everyone decides they want Italian for dinner, while I’d prefer a burger from a local gastropub. So I offer to pick up the Italian while having the brewpub deliver. At the dinner table an hour later, though, I’m staring at an overcooked puck of a burger topped with wilted lettuce and slimy pickles sandwiched between a crusty bun, while the Italian aromas wafting down the table are mouthwatering.

Cue temper tantrum number three.

As this one ramps up, it finally occurs to me that my heart has been closing on a hair trigger. However, it isn’t closing to my people; it’s closing to my life. To situations. To circumstances. To the way the ball is bouncing and the cookie is crumbling. In that moment, one of the great treasures of the openhearted journey is revealed to me.

Openheartedness isn’t just about choosing to truly love, it’s about choosing to fully live.

It is precisely at that moment that Vuvu tells one of the dirtiest jokes a ninety-five-year-old man has ever told, and the table erupts in laughter. Tears stream down my mother-in-law’s cheeks, as she actively struggles not to wet her pants. My wife and daughter are also wiping tears of laughter from their eyes. Vuvu just takes another bite of veal meatballs through a small smile.

I’ve been missing all of it, trapped as I’ve been inside my closed heart.

Here are four generations of a family, breaking bread together and making merry, despite the fact that life has not gone the way any of them wanted. Vuvu has lost the love of his life and is as lonely a soul as I’ve ever seen. My mother-in-law has recently buried her third husband, after burying two previous husbands. The first of those was my wife’s father, who died of an undiagnosed heart defect when she was three. Life has not gone the way this family wanted, and yet here they are, with their hearts still open to it.

Their defiant laughter is as holy a human sound as I’ve ever heard. So I take my phone from my pocket and text myself a mission statement for the rest of the vacation:

Don’t miss the sacredness of any moment by wishing it was some other way.

As the practice of openheartedness deepens and endures, we surrender to the simplicity of how the human heart works. When it gets what it wants from life, it naturally opens to the moment. When it doesn’t get what it wants from life, it will be inclined to close to the moment. However, in doing so it will also close out all the goodness and grace that exist in any ordinary, unwanted moment.

“When we make a pact with ourselves to show up for reality just as it is,” writes spiritual teacher Mirabai Starr, “reality rewards us by revealing hidden holiness, its ordinary wonder, its fruitful shadows and radiant wounds.”

So, we show up to it, by opening our hearts to even the things we don’t want—especially the things we don’t want—because they are happening here, and here is holy. Time may be the fourth dimension, but holiness is the fifth, and it can’t be perceived with our hearts closed.

If you open your heart, though,

eventually you won’t be able to look away,

as you come to see the hidden holiness

in even the hardest of things.

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• Does this mission statement feel helpful or impossible? Do you notice your heart opening to it or closing to it? Where have you seen the holiness hidden in hard things? What other reactions do you have to this post? Feel free to share in the comments, and I’ll be sure to reply!

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