“… awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water, this is water.’ // It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.”
– David Foster Wallace, to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College
As I was walking down 9th Street, all I could think of was how perverted, how twisted and ugly and unfuckingbelievably depraved I am. I may as well have been telling myself that I was a piece of shit, an unlovable, unloving subhuman who lacks even the basic emotional architecture to see others as anything other than cheap vessels for my one-sided, transactionally childish interactions. In a loop it went: I’m fucked. I’ll always be fucked. I can’t do anything but fuck up and fuck others over. I’m a saboteur.
And then I felt it: The sun hit my legs, and my attention turned to the warmth of awareness washing over me. Suddenly, I breathed and focused on the rays infiltrating my skin. I awoke from the self-shaming narrative I had come to love, rely on, and be addicted to. I was here, in the moment, zenned out to Nirvana on some wuji shit, dude.
In other words, I pulled the needle off of a bad, if familiar, record. You see, our brains operate – in a sense quite literally – in grooves. Our thoughts are physical, with physical effects and traces left on our brains. Our patterns of thought, once grooved into the brain, are difficult to escape. Like records, it seems that the needle of our consciousness has no place to go but the familiar patterns traced over dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of times before.
So how do we consciously pause, remove the needle, stroll to our record collection, and cue up a new, more positively grooved album?
To be honest, I have no clue. I’ve participated in a lot of meditative practice and had a pretty steady and serious routine for a couple of years. Since then, I don’t do as many formal sits as I used to, but I do stretch (call it yoga if you must) and try to notice what’s actually, physically real whenever possible – on the bus, riding the subway, or in line at the supermarket I love to loathe.
But what the hell is even real? My breath seems like an undeniable physical truth (as long as I’m alive, that is). Sensations, for sure (yes, even that seemingly unbearable back pain is the source of your enlightenment). Other than that? It’s hard to tell. One thing’s for sure: There’s plenty in our environment to focus on besides that narcissistic shit we [I] love to silently kill our sacred nature with.
So next time you feel like a little tyrant of your own mind, try, like, actually looking around (instead of inwards at the insanity we [I] cling to). You may be surprised by what you find.