October 1, 2025
Some thoughts live longer than others. William Blake’s famous lines from Auguries of Innocence are among those that refuse to fade. The words are over 200 years old, but they still manage to land with fresh force. Blake wasn’t asking us to build cathedrals or climb mountains to find meaning, he was telling us that everything we’re searching for is already contained in the smallest pieces of our lives.
I don’t know about you, but I often get caught chasing “big” things. A new project. The next milestone. That gadget I swear will fix my workflow. (it usually doesn’t.) Yet the moments that actually shift my perspective rarely look big at all.
The other day, I was watching my youngest laugh hysterically as the cat batted at floating dust in a shaft of sunlight. Dust! To her, it was comedy gold. And it hit me: this is exactly what Blake was talking about. If a grain of sand can be a world, a dust mote can be a circus.
Infinity, Blake suggests, isn’t tucked away in grand gestures, it’s hiding in the overlooked. Eternity doesn’t always arrive in decades; sometimes it slips into a single hour, if we’re paying attention.
I’ve seen this play out in surprising ways. Years ago, I remember stepping outside after a rainstorm, barefoot, and feeling the cool, wet grass under my feet. For a second, nothing else existed. No deadlines, no responsibilities, just that patch of grass and me. If that wasn’t eternity in an hour, I don’t know what is.
It’s easy to think of moments like these as “nice to have.” Something we’ll notice once the important stuff is done. But Blake reminds us that these are the important things. Seeing a world in a grain of sand requires slowing down enough to notice. And that’s harder than it sounds in a culture that celebrates speed, productivity, and constant motion.
The challenge, then, is to ask ourselves: what tiny thing have I overlooked today? Maybe it’s the way your coffee smells before you take that first sip. Or the sound of your kid humming while building Legos. Or even the silence that follows a deep breath when you finally stop moving for a moment.
These things aren’t extras, they’re the whole point.
I’ve written before about how meaning often hides in what we think of as interruptions. Like the time I stepped into cat vomit first thing in the morning. That was disgusting, yes. But it also reminded me that life doesn’t wait for us to get our act together before it arrives.
Blake’s words are an invitation. Not to seek more, but to see more. To let the grain of sand, the wildflower, the laugh, or the blade of grass be enough. To hold infinity in the palm of your hand by simply noticing that it’s already there.
Maybe today’s task isn’t about achieving or checking boxes. Maybe it’s about stopping long enough to catch the eternity slipping through the cracks of ordinary life.
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