How to infuse your everyday life with meaning

The ability to infuse is one of the greatest powers you have

Image via Francisco Ribeiro

Dear You,

In the Vietnam war, writes the author and psychologist Thomas Moore, many “Vietnamese refugees abandoned their homes with nothing in their hands but their little shrines.”

Think what it meant that out of all the items they could have carried, from a house they’d never see again – and knowing they could flee faster and farther if they carried nothing at all – they chose to bring a homemade shrine. This speaks to how much sacred objects mean to us - and how they require not the grandeur of cathedrals that take hundreds of years to erect, but rather the infusion of meaning into homespun objects and practices.

The infusion itself is the magic, the alchemy, the miracle. And the power to infuse is a power that all of us have. There’s nothing superhuman, or supernatural, about it.

Last week, I shared with you that I’m back in Book-Research-Land, which is my favorite land of all — and that I’m going to share with you some glimmers of what I’m learning, and thinking about, along the way.

I’m still deep into Thomas Moore’s classic “Care of the Soul”. So this week - here are some of Moore’s practical ideas on how you can infuse your daily life with meaning (with a few guest appearances from the psychologist Carl Jung and the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr).

Francisco Ribeiro shared this photo of Lisbon on X, with the note that “Autumn shows us how beautiful it is to let things go.” This too is an example of infusing everyday life with the sacred. Maybe, as you walk by, you don’t notice this scene at all. Or maybe you see a city street full of leaves. Or, maybe, what you see is an instantiation of the cycle of life, death and rebirth. You decide.

Here you go: