I'd started several posts over the last couple of months and then left them unfinished as drafts; here in this post, I've tried to consolidate the ideas and deleted the drafts. It's interesting (and disconcerting) to see that the same ideas have kept coming up, unresolved, in my life since I was a teenager. I keep twirling them over and over in my mind, looking----always----for how to live my life.
After reading Wolf's piece, "A Case for Presence," I considered again why the average person seems to have such difficulty sustaining this sense of presence for any length of time. Of course, many people are uncomfortable with what may be perceived as not producing anything. We are taught that we must always have something to show for our time, so that leaves out observing for the sake of observation, experience for its own sake. Not-doing has come to mean instead watching television, becoming numb.
Most of us are trained from childhood to fit into a certain mold, our lives planned out for us from school to career to retirement to death. It's no wonder we become uncomfortable when we act outside the typical, the norm.
Saying that the experience of danger tends to snap us into attention to the present serves to remind us of the attractions of camping out, of riding a motorcycle, long hikes, of any sort of movement into the unknown where the unexpected can occur. More typically, we arrange our lives in just the opposite way, surrounding ourselves with comfort and predictability, becoming fearful and distraught when a schedule is disrupted or the electricity goes off.
Homogeneity has become the standard so that no one is surprised by any potential unpleasantness----which precludes the possibility of the unexpected delight, too.
And when I do try to communicate, I remember that no matter what I say or don't say, do or don't do, someone else can always see that as a hook to capture me and place me neatly folded in a box of theirs. But that in itself should never stop me from saying or doing what I feel is true and right in the moment, even when, upon circumspection or learning more, I find out that I was wrong. How else can anyone ever discover and experience truth as a part of the world? Otherwise, I would continue as I have been for much of my life----isolated, ruminating alone, silencing my voice that I'd learned to characterize as a bit too strange and never quite good enough.
