It was a bit less than two years ago that I found myself trudging down a narrow road beside the sea in Nova Scotia, with a thought trapped inside my head that was so large that I found it almost impossible to continue walking until I had somehow found a way to get it out into words. Some part of me thought it might be important while another part feared it might be one of those strange mystical moments that makes perfect sense at the time, but later, in the sober light of morning, makes no sense at all and even seems a little silly.
I stopped by the side of the road and dug out my wallet to look for a scrap of paper to write down my idea. My dog looked up with a half-cocked look of inquisition. Here's what I wrote:
"Much of modern life's invention is designed to free our attention from the minutiae of existence. But what masquerades as liberation robs us of the exquisite particularity of life, in the service of a supposedly greater agenda."
I still remember the moment when I got home, soaking wet from rain and sea spray, having raced along a gravel beach short cut to get back to the house to etch the words into print before they faded away. Those words seemed like a kind of turning point for me. All of the months of isolation from big city life,all of the lonely walks along the shore, the silent mornings of meditation spent trying to understand how I had come to be and where I wanted to go next seemed to boil down to these few words.
I read them aloud to my dog. I listened to each phrase, testing it for worth. It all felt true. One of the main constraints on how we think and act has to do with the attentional bottleneck that forces us to plod through life with one event after another vying for it's intimate moment with our consciousness. Moment by moment, one thing wins out and captures our attention. All else falls away and remains unnoticed. The modern built environment, with its roadways brimming with signs, the carefully carpentered corners of office corridors, and the well-marked trails through urban parks collectively conspire to influence where, how and when we pay attention to things. All of this is supposed to make life tractable, even easy for us. Our minds are steered from one place, one goal, one object to another.
How different we are when lost in a dense thicket of woods or wandering aimlessly along a beachy trail beside the ocean. With no signs, no human designs, no engineered markers, there's a shift in how we see things which is at first subtle and then can become such a loud roar that it can almost bring one to one's knees, as it did to me that day. Unseen worlds open up to our awareness. We think and feel differently and, allowed to unfold the full extent of consciousness on our surroundings, we even become healthier. Literally, our physiology changes.
I've spent much of today with a sharp student trying to figure out how we can understand some of this in the laboratory. Like a Heisenberg phenomenon, it may be impossible to do this. It may be that what we want to understand will shatter in our hands when we reach out to grab it.
But maybe not.
Comments