Freshness

It’s hard to think of a word or an idea more intuitively appealing than freshness. Perhaps that’s because the concept of freshness is rooted in the primal and sensual world of food and nourishment. And in something even more primal, the air we breathe. Fresh air. Who doesn’t love it?

Words and ideas can be as fresh or as stale as air and food. And when you get to be my age, and you’ve heard it all many times, everything begins to sound like a cliché. Like that phrase, “When you get to be my age....” What’s the problem with clichés? The problem is that they are so familiar that we don’t pay attention to them any more, and because we don’t pay attention, they don’t have meaning.

The same thing can happen to the experience of life itself. Hamlet said it best: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.” Ever feel that way? Who hasn’t?

The quality of Maharaji I’m writing about is that he is always fresh. There is nothing old, stale, or tired about him. You’ll never catch him at it. Believe me. I’ve tried. He doesn’t do tired. Even when he’s tired, he isn’t tired.

What makes this quality passionately admirable is that it’s contagious. He is not only fresh. He is refreshing. That is, he makes everything around him fresh again. Most of all, the people themselves. Freshness is a feeling. There is nothing like it. A place where boredom is unimaginable. Freshness is one of the great gifts of his company.

But it’s not only the people. It’s everything, even words and ideas. Pick a cliché. Any cliché. Look at it in isolation. Tired, right? Now take the same cliché and hold it up next to Maharaji. Like magic, it’s not a cliché any more. It’s full of meaning. It’s fresh. It’s a whole new idea.

Let’s take a random example, the hackneyed phrase “never ceases to amaze.” Definitely tired. But think about it for a minute. What a powerful statement! Amazement without end. Constant amazement. Where can you really find that in life? Doesn’t “wow” always turn into “ho hum” eventually? What is always amazing?

The answer, in a word, is life. But to refresh that cliché, you need a master refresher. Passionate admiration and its close companion, gratitude, naturally well up in response to the first-hand experience of that kind of mastery.