Tending the Quite Arrival of Awareness

In the last two reflections, I wrote about sensing that something no longer fits, and then discovering that effort and adjustment no longer help. What I want to turn toward now is what can follow next; not clarity, not direction, but a very subtle and unsettling form of awareness. I am referring to a certain type of awareness, and its arrival before we recognize it as such. This awareness does not announce itself clearly, and it does not come with language or reassurance.

Eventually we can recognize its distinct from our usual concepts of awareness, but that is eventually. And how this awareness comes to people is as varied as beetles on the planet. For me, it came as a stripping, like pulling a large bandage off the skin. It was sudden, exposed, and painful, and I had no idea what had just happened.

Before I ever thought of this as awareness, it felt like pain and emptiness. I had the distinct sense that someone, or something, was watching, though I had no idea what that meant. It was deeply disconcerting. No one in my circle recognized what I was describing, and I wondered if I was losing my mind. I intuited that whatever this was would fundamentally change my life, and that made it both compelling and frightening.

The Friction of the Mind

My response was to try to understand it. I went to people I trusted. I tried, again and again, to explain what was happening, but nothing landed. My mind was frantic: What is this? Please help. Please give me a map. I sensed that this was, what I would call, of a spiritual nature, but it bore no resemblance to anything I had learned in church. If this was spirituality, I wasn’t sure I wanted it.

I did not lose touch with this awareness, but I can see now that I met it with a clenched fist rather than an open palm. Instead of abiding with the mystery, I tried to make it intelligible. I ran toward names and definitions, trying to find a map for a country that had none. Stillness was what was being asked, but stillness is a terrifying request when the mind is frantic.

The terror came from the sheer inability to take in this gift through any of the usual channels; there was nothing to achieve, apply, or fix. Learning mystery, it turns out, is a slow process. And slowness has a way of stirring anxiety: Will I ever get this? Am I missing something? Am I falling behind?

The Echoes of the Old World

This awareness did not feel like a choice. It felt as though something had chosen me. Life as usual continued on the outside, which made it easy to believe that nothing was happening at all. And yet something unmistakable had shifted within.

Because life on the outside continued as usual, the old voices of my culture began to whisper their familiar demands. If this is real, they asked, where are the results? Shouldn’t you be more successful by now? Shouldn’t your relationships be better, happier, fixed? These are the questions of a world that prizes utility over presence. It took time to realize that this journey didn’t, and would never, align with my inherited values. Awareness does not fix the old life; it begins a new one.

A Different Kind of Knowing

Eventually, the frantic energy of the mind ran out of breath. In that exhaustion, a different kind of knowing began to appear. It was not a mental achievement, but an arrival of sorts; quiet, grounded, and strangely balanced. It did not carry the frantic energy of the thinking mind. It was simply there. Steady and obscure, yes, but unmistakable. I began to trust that the truth does not need my frantic effort to remain true.

If I could protect one thing about this moment, it would be its fragility. Awareness like this is easy to dismiss because it does not announce itself with clarity or reward. It asks for patience and it asks for gentleness. It asks us to cut ourselves an extraordinary amount of slack, which cuts against the grain of our culture.

This awareness is not a gift for you. It is the gift of you.

Precious is the word that comes to mind when I contemplate this gift. It is something worth tending, even if it asks us to release much of what we once relied upon. This release does not have to be all at once, or heroic, and most likely it will be slow. Slow is what it takes to learn through the not knowing and live from a different place.

A Reflection for the Road

Where in your life is something "quietly coming online" that doesn’t yet have a name? Can you allow it to be here, obscure and steady, without fixing or explaining it?