The essays now carry my voice.

Subscribe now

A small addition to the Attending shelf: I recorded each essay aloud, and the audio sits at the top of every post. Press play in the Substack app or on the web, and the words arrive the way they were spoken. I read every draft aloud before it earns its place here. Now you’re in the room for it.

These pieces began in shared places anyway. A bedtime question. A kitchen sink. A word that landed and wears through me still. It feels right they can meet you as sound.

And for those who live by their ears: Attending the Days is now a proper podcast. You’ll find it on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you keep your listening. The porch light is on.

If your eyes are full today, let your ears do the attending for a while.

— Isaiah

Share Attending the Days: Essays from Lifelook

More from Lifelook

Heaven and Earth are impartial

And regard myriad things as straw dogs.¹

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Campfires don’t care what we call them.

We learn this young if we’re lucky. My family learned it across Wisconsin summers throughout the 1990s, hauling a canvas tent that grew mold if we rolled it too soon. Green stains bloomed along the seams. The canvas apparently harbored its own opinions about timing.

Once the mold had its way, our family graduated to a Palomino pop-up camper. The camper carried a horse’s name but dragged at the speed of a packed cinderblock equipped with rusty rollers. Our dad hitched it to the red Ford Aerostar as we hauled it across the country, the trailer gently swaying along the curves. The backseat smelled fiercely of bug spray and sunscreen, curiously blended with the wafting ghosts of loaded diapers – a biological mystery considering the youngest of us had been potty-trained for a few years.

That Aerostar and Palomino duo saw a lot.

Lake Michigan’s sandy dune shoreline one summer. The Gulf of Mexico the next. Lake Superior buttressing Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on another. We just call it the U-P, or, if you’re local-ish, da U-P. That lake does not care about your vacation. It holds the temperature of a wronged ghost trapped by sheets of melting glacier. You do not swim in it so much as survive it, emerging blue-lipped, entirely awake, and stripped of whatever petty grievances you carried into the surf.

Then the big family trip to the rim of the Grand Canyon where we stood at the edge as the silence held us... until the grind of someone’s Kodak disposable broke the spell. We endured that mechanical kkhhhk-kkhhhk-kkhhhk of the film advance, because even awe had to wait for the winding.² The winding ground to a halt as we descended into the canyon, trading the mechanical obligation of capturing the moment for the staggering, silent weight of actually walking inside it.

The hills of Kentucky, where our Aerostar’s transmission finally surrendered to the Palomino’s weight against the endless rolling grades, stranded us for two days in a dry county. Us kids, ecstatic about our surprise hotel cable TV and chlorinated pool. Our parents, quietly calculating the grim math of unplanned automotive repair without the anesthesia of a single beer to wash it down.

We recovered, and the next year off we went to the Badlands of South Dakota, where the landscape looks like the earth tried to turn itself inside out and got halfway before losing interest. My brother and I found an arrowhead there, knapped by a hand long before our minivan ever rattled past. Lives attended to that ground for ages before our family trip crossed its path. The Badlands keep the whole record and cling to nothing.³

We found our way back to northern Wisconsin and the UP. We treated that rugged peninsula as our own. It stands as a wild, pine-choked territory geographically grafted to Wisconsin but legally kidnapped by Michigan over a forgotten border dispute involving Toledo. We claimed its wilderness anyway.

Across the years and state parks, every campsite starts with ritual. Gather kindling. Stack the logs. Strike the match. Then have a pause. The flame catches, and the circle of faces leans in, because warmth pulls us closer before thought does. Nobody tells us to lean. The fire warms whoever sits close. It burns because fire burns.

We happily submit to the ritual. Lao Tzu once compared all of creation to straw dogs: small woven figures used in ancient ceremonies and discarded once the ritual ended. We are those straw dogs, fully participating in the ceremony of living. We gather around the heat, entirely present before the moment passes and the earth reclaims us. The fire simply reminds us of our place in the sequence.

We lean in because we intuitively understand something fundamental: existence operates with a blind, generous neutrality according to its own time. Conditions and circumstances constantly change, but the underlying essence of existence remains. Heraclitus saw the cosmos as one ordering, the same for all: “fire everliving, kindled in measures and in measures going out.”⁴ To the universe, he observed, “all things are fair and good and just, but humans have taken some things unjust, others as just.”⁵ The flame holds no malice and plays no favorites. The fire remains entirely indifferent to acting as a savior or a destroyer. We assign the role.

That neutrality follows us home. The stovetop flame that cooks breakfast. The candle on the kitchen table during a power outage. We call it “cozy” around the campsite and “dangerous” in the headlines. Fire remains the same between those two sentences. Our attending turns the meaning.

For over sixty years, the United States built a policy around a single, hardening assumption: fire destroys.

The Great Fire of 1910 burned three million acres across the Northern Rockies and killed nearly eighty people.⁶ Congress responded with the Weeks Act the following year, establishing a framework for cooperative firefighting and federal purchase of forest lands.⁷ By 1935, the Forest Service had codified its “10 a.m. policy”: any wildfire spotted had to be suppressed by ten the next morning.⁸ The label hardened into infrastructure. Watchtowers. Roads. Budgets. Smokey Bear.⁹ An entire professional identity organized around a single premise.

The system projected coherence from the inside: suppress the flame, protect the timber. For decades, it looked wildly successful.

Yet the undergrowth kept building. Dead leaves, fallen branches, and dry brush accumulated on the forest floor, a century of fuel waiting in the wings because the small fires that clear the ground never received permission to burn. The sealed system, well-intentioned but driven entirely by the fear of losing control, manufactured the conditions for heightened catastrophe it claimed to prevent. When the fires finally arrived – as the sky-darkening, megadrought-fueled infernos we have witnessed over the last decade painfully remind us – they swept through uncontainable. They burned hotter, faster, and more violently than anything the pre-suppression forests encountered. We tried to legislate nature to protect ourselves, and in doing so, we built our own pyre.

The suffering tells us what the well-intended policy missed. Fortunately, nature also suggests pathways to repair.

Step into the Klamath River basin, and we see Indigenous peoples working with fire for millennia. The Karuk of Northern California practice cultural burning: small, intentional, seasonal.¹⁰ They treat fire as medicine. They read the flame’s tempo the way a musician reads a rest between phrases, attending to fire’s eigenzeit: nature’s own timing, the pace inherent to a process that resists being hurried beyond its own happening.¹¹

And fire answers them. Certain pinecones crack open only in extreme heat, spilling seeds that waited years for the burn to free them. The fire that clears the floor is the fire that calls the forest back. Their forests thrive because they move with the grain of what fire already does. Nature tends toward harmony, in its own time.

Even so, the forest keeps part of itself hidden. How flame and seed and soil answer one another runs deeper than anyone traces, the Karuk included. We move with the pattern without seeing all of it. Heraclitus said the hidden attunement is better than the obvious one,¹² and we can let the unseen part stay unseen.

One system sealed itself around a label and stopped listening: it severed its relationship with the natural pattern. The other kept the conversation going. You can read the difference in the smoke.

The pattern plays inside our bodies, too.

Inflammation begins as generosity. A cut on the hand, a twisted ankle, a virus crossing the threshold. The damage calls, and the body answers with everything it has: blood, white cells, and heat rush toward the wound. The swelling that aches is the swelling that mends. Our body pours its resources toward repair, performing its deepest biological imperative. It does exactly what it evolved to do.

Like fire, inflammation mobilizes, protects, and restores without consulting our moral categories. The response ignores “good” and “bad.”

The trouble arrives when that inflammatory cascade loses contact with the larger system and turns its generous attention into overabundance lacking discernment. The restoration efforts lose their harmony. Resonance rings flat. When the immune system floods the body without reading the whole room, it disrupts the very restoration it set out to perform. The body begins attacking its own tissue. Joints swell against cartilage that belongs there. The gut lining erodes under friendly fire. The immune system builds its own closed loop, resonant within its sealed perception, responding to threats that exist only inside the seal.

We feel the misalignment before any diagnosis arrives. The fatigue that won’t lift. The ache that wanders without locating itself. That low hum of a system running against its own grain. The body knows first. The discord builds on its eigenzeit, beneath our awareness, until the signal finally breaks the surface.

Two patterns, then. One outside the skin, one inside. Fire and inflammation. Both neutral in their original motion. Both generous. Both capable of destruction when sealed off from the larger pattern they belong to.

In Lifelook, I call the ground beneath these patterns Nature’s Values: three movements that recur like the bassline of existence.¹³

• Generosity: nature’s intrinsic givingness. Purpose moving from within, potential offered without demand. The fire warms before we ask. The body repairs before we decide.

• Resonance: existence vibrating in relationship, where patterns respond to patterns and meaning arises in the space between. The forest and the fire reading each other. The immune cell and the tissue it protects, joined in mutual recognition.

• Harmony: the confluence of opposites where difference generates unity through motion. Burn and regrow. Inflame and heal. Day listening into night, a joining that deepens both.

Generosity moves first among the three. The potential it offers, freely and without demand, is what lets patterns find one another and settle, in their own time, into harmony. The gift precedes the accord it makes possible.

These three underpin our whole existence, the conditions we inhabit simply by being here. Attune to them, and we feel the alignment. Cut against them, and we feel the cost. We don’t manufacture resonance or engineer harmony or produce generosity. We clear enough debris away to find them already humming.

This clearing mirrors the Karuk’s cultural burn. We intentionally tend the ground, allowing small, daily fires of awareness to burn through our accumulated mental dry brush. When we refuse to clear this internal undergrowth, when we legislate our inner state like the Weeks Act, suppressing every uncomfortable spark to protect ourselves from feeling, the fuel builds. We manufacture our own emotional inferno.

Nature’s values carry no inherent moral weight. They hum the way gravity pulls: neutrally. Our attending, our agency, and our choices supply the direction, the coloring, and the weight. Generosity underwrites both the Karuk’s cultural burn and the Forest Service’s century of suppression. The difference lives in ways of attending to the resonance and harmony between them.

A fair contradiction surfaces here. If these forces stay neutral, why does nature keep settling toward balance? It does settle. Cut against resonance and harmony, and the strain burns out, and the pattern finds its level again. But a tendency is not a preference, and neutral was never the same as directionless. Gravity prefers nothing, yet it rounds every star, a fierce and reliable pull that favors no one.¹⁴ Its even hand spares none. It breaks the fragile thing as readily as the stone, and impartial and unforgiving turn out to be one property, not two.

Nature leans toward coherence with the same fierce reliability, a pull and not a wish. And the coherence it reaches stays neutral. The Forest Service’s suppression settled into one kind of order. The Karuk’s burning settles into another. Both are balance. Which one, and whether it gives life or takes it, is the part we supply.

We don’t add our way to the living one. We clear our way there, the way the Karuk clear the forest floor, until what was always humming underneath comes through.¹⁵

Let’s pull up a chair at the attending table. The coffee grinder howls. The toaster ejects a slightly charred bagel. The dog stares at the drywall, actively decoding a frequency we cannot hear. We sit down amid this domestic clatter and immediately begin sorting the universe into neat little boxes. The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa once observed that wisdom is ultimately “a domestic affair.”¹⁶ That phrase keeps proving itself right here, over the breakfast crumbs.

We label things “good” and “bad” a hundred times before lunch. The traffic. The text that could mean anything, though we’ve already decided what it means. The weather. The look on a colleague’s face that we’ve interpreted, filed, and responded to before the elevator reaches our floor. Each label is a small act of attending, and each one seeds the next encounter.

Much like those Karuk pinecones requiring the intense heat of the flame to crack open, some of our most abundant encounters require the friction of an uncomfortable moment to release their insight. When we lean into the heat rather than label it a threat, we allow the seeds to spread and do their growing. We co-create the world we inhabit through these micro-choices, most of them running under the floorboards of our awareness.

Beneath those floorboards, some older, faster part of us scans the world before the conscious mind finishes the updates. The cell biologist Bruce Lipton captures the speed of this shaping: the subconscious mind reads every word on a newspaper page before our conscious mind finishes unfolding it.¹⁷ The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett finds this in the brain itself, which runs as a continuous prediction engine, drafting the world a half-step before it arrives.¹⁸ What the brain flags depends entirely on what we have primed it to find.

A person living in love moves toward love wherever it sits on the page. A person living in fear spots threat in every headline. One newspaper. One morning. Two entirely different worlds.

What we attend to today adds a brushstroke to the painting we wake up inside tomorrow. Much of the painting, we inherit. Some of it, we choose. The question sits with how much of the choosing happens with our eyes open.

Our choosing determines whether we fight the breakdown or sit by the pool without a beer.

Our family trips graduated from that moldy canvas tent to the Palomino, hauled by a van destined to blow its transmission under the pressure of the Kentucky hills. The breakdown was unplanned, deeply inconvenient, and entirely inevitable. Yet, paying for that unexpected repair mid-trip forced an unplanned pause. It allowed us to tend to those new circumstances with a freshly cleared mind. We pulled up a plastic chair at the chlorinated motel swimming pool. We marveled at the staggering abundance of basic cable TV, realizing it offered infinitely more than the five channels we received at home (this was the mid-1990s, remember). The breakdown arrived uninvited. Our attending shaped the memory of it.

Campfires ignore what we call them. They burn because burning is what fire knows. The warmth I felt leaning in on those Wisconsin nights, faces lit and shadows cast long behind me, had already arrived. It offered its heat before I asked, disregarding my gratitude and my fear alike. The fire never knew us. What hums beneath it might.

What are we primed to find? Does our attending move with the grain of how life already holds together, or against it? The bassline hums either way. It always has.

Long live that Palomino.

For more on Nature’s Values and the Lifelook philosophy: https://lifelooknow.com/natures-values

Share Attending the Days: Essays from Lifelook

Summary: Reality operates with an open, generous neutrality. It tends toward balance yet holds no preferences as it keeps its own time. Our attending dictates the rest. How we choose to perceive, prime, and respond to the world determines whether we flow with the grain of existence or manufacture our own suffering. To live well is to move as the field of change itself, feeling it, questioning it, and following it with care. When we stop suppressing the small, daily fires and begin attuning to their eigenzeit, we cease fighting the breakdown. We see nature’s inherent generosity and can rest within its movement.

Notes

*Fire Image: Image generated with Gemini AI assistance based on the author’s design direction.

1. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: Annotated & Explained, trans. and annot. Derek Lin (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths, 2006), chap. 5. “Myriad things” is also translated as The Ten Thousand things, which essentially means all of things that make up our universe that we see and experience. Straw dogs are small dog figurines made from straw. They were used in ancient times for rituals and then discarded after use.

2. Some families have heirlooms. We have memorylooms, stitched together through a pop-up camper with a car-top carrier that rattled and Kodak disposables with twenty-seven exposures held by a prayer they’d capture the trip. The gear was never the treasure. The days were. A rattling carrier and a disposable camera hold nothing on their own, and both are long gone now. They were vehicles toward the experience, and the experience is the part that stayed. We hold the objects lightly because the memory is what we keep, and the smallest thing can conjure it back, the way a smell drops you into your grandmother’s kitchen thirty years later, or the back seat of an Aerostar.

3. The Badlands keep a calendar. Wind and water lay each layer down in order, and erosion reads them back to us, stratum by stratum, tens of millions of years legible in the rock. The arrowhead belongs to that record too, a life pressed into the ground and surfaced without ceremony. What the land never does is hold on. It carries the dead forward in stone and grieves none of them, stacks the eons and favors no single one. This posture turns up everywhere once you start looking: the straw dogs honored in the ritual and released after, the balance that remains only as residue, the generosity that gives and asks for nothing back.

4. Heraclitus, fragment XXXVII in Kahn’s arrangement, which is B30 in the standard Diels-Kranz numbering. Kahn renders it: “The ordering (kosmos), the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it ever was and is and will be: fire everliving, kindled in measures and in measures going out.” Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; repr. 2001), text 45, commentary 132. Kahn reorders the fragments under his own Roman numerals, so they differ from the Diels-Kranz figures readers may know.

5. This line on human categories is attributed to Heraclitus from secondary sources. See fragment LXVIII (DK B102). Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Kahn LXVIII, text 61, commentary 183.

6. The Great Fire of 1910, also known as the “Big Burn,” swept across Idaho, Montana, and Washington in a 36-hour firestorm. It remains one of the largest wildfires in American history. See Stephen J. Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing, 2008); Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).

7. The Weeks Act, signed by President William Howard Taft on March 1, 1911, authorized federal purchase of forest lands and established the first framework for cooperative fire control between federal and state authorities. It laid the foundation for the National Forest System in the eastern United States. See “1911 Weeks Act: The Legislation that Nationalized the U.S. Forest Service,” Forest History Society, https://foresthistory.org.

8. U.S. Forest Service Chief Ferdinand Silcox issued the directive in May 1935, calling for “fast, energetic, and thorough suppression of all fires in all locations.” The policy was formally abandoned in 1978 in favor of approaches that recognized fire’s ecological role, though its influence persists. See “U.S. Forest Service Fire Suppression,” Forest History Society, https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service-history/policy-and-law/fire-u-s-forest-service/u-s-forest-service-fire-suppression/.

9. Smokey Bear debuted in 1944 as part of the Forest Service’s fire prevention campaign. His slogan, “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires,” became one of the most recognized public service messages in American history. As a campaign, it worked, and it prevented countless careless fires. Whether the larger policy it served stayed in tune with the forest is another question.

10. The Karuk Tribe, whose traditional homelands sit along the middle Klamath River in Northern California, have practiced cultural burning for millennia. The Karuk word pikyavmeans “to fix,” and cultural burning is understood as a form of land repair and spiritual responsibility. The passage of the Weeks Act in 1911 effectively made cultural burns illegal, a policy the Karuk have spent over a century working to reverse. In 2025, California and the Karuk Tribe established a groundbreaking agreement under Senate Bill 310, empowering Karuk cultural fire practitioners to conduct burns under Traditional Ecological Knowledge. See “California Partners with Karuk Tribe on Groundbreaking Cultural Burning Agreement,” Karuk Tribe Press Release, February 2025, https://www.karuk.us.

11. Eigenzeit (German: “own time” or “proper time”) refers to the time inherent to a process. The term originates in physics, specifically Einstein’s special relativity where it denotes the proper time measured by a clock moving with an observer, but it has found a second life in philosophy, ecology, and social theory, wherever a process keeps its own counsel. Bread rises when bread rises. A two-year-old puts on shoes when the two-year-old puts on shoes. Forests burn when forests need to burn.

12. Heraclitus, fragment LXXX in Kahn’s arrangement, which is B54 in the standard Diels-Kranz numbering. Kahn renders it “the hidden attunement is better than the obvious one.” Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; repr. 2001), text 65, commentary 202. Kahn admired it as one of the shortest and most finely built of the fragments: four Greek words, the unseen (aphanēs) set against the seen (phanerēs), with kreittōn, “stronger” or “better,” perhaps tipping the weight toward what stays hidden. I have come to find some comfort in that. We don’t need to see all of it for the attunement to hold, and accepting our ignorance becomes its own quiet harmony.

13. I explore Nature’s Values more fully at lifelooknow.com/the-books. The framework draws on the Platonic triad: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, brought closer to the body: Truth lives as Resonance felt, Beauty as Harmony unveiled, Goodness as Generosity embodied.

14. We say pull because that is how it feels, but Newton's force was only ever the first draft. Einstein, in 1915, found something stranger and so far more accurate: mass and energy curve the geometry of spacetime, and what we feel as a pull is really objects following the straightest path available through that curving. No hand reaches out. The Earth does not tug the moon so much as bend the space the moon coasts through. Things fall because the ground leans that way. The felt weight survives the reframing. The metaphysics under it changes entirely, from a hand to a hollow. Which, for an essay about ground, is a quiet gift: nothing pushes us toward coherence. It is simply downhill.

15. The deepest traditions treat this clearing as an uncovering. The Sanskrit moksha and the Japanese Zen satori both point toward release rather than acquisition: you stop generating the noise that hides the ground, and what remains was always there. The via negativa of the Christian contemplatives and the neti neti (”not this, not this”) of the Upanishads name by removing. Balance, in this light, is less a place we arrive than a hum we stop drowning out.

16. The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa observed that wisdom is ultimately “a domestic affair.” The full context of his observation lands even harder than the excerpt: wisdom verified in oneself, tested in the dailiness of living, then brought back to the world. The kitchen counts. See Chögyam Trungpa, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation, ed. John Baker and Marvin Casper (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1976), 93.

17. Cell biologist Bruce Lipton captures the speed of this biological shaping. His broader work on cellular biology and perception, particularly The Biology of Belief(Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2005), explores how our beliefs govern biological response at the cellular level. The newspaper metaphor captures something his research corroborates: what we attend to determines what we encounter, often before we realize we’ve chosen.

18. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s extensive research on constructed emotion demonstrates that our brains continuously predict and construct our reality rather than merely reacting to it. I explore how this predictive machinery shapes our daily agency, and how we might interrupt it, in another essay, “The Dangled Pause Option.” See lifelooknow.com/attending-the-days/f/the-pause-before-responding.

Subscribe now

Share Attending the Days: Essays from Lifelook

Today is a day that I can stand, 
a loan from tomorrow. 
With this in mind, I re-mind: 
my stance will someday falter. 
And so it goes, 
that west wind knows, 
my presencing un-and-alters. 

As I stand, choice demands: 
forming pathways always. 
In that choice, I see a way, 
a gentle rush, reminder: 
Choose the day. 

I choose today.

— Isaiah Behnke

Share

Leave a comment

Share Attending the Days: Essays from Lifelook

“Dad, what happens when we die?”

The question arrived with twilight, slipping in after the usual jostle for pillow real estate. He asked it casually, as if checking tomorrow’s weather. Not weighty nor fearful, just wonder floating in the dim glow of the sagging wall lamp that barely clung to its mounting. A child’s room has its own gravity.

I let the question linger. This seven-year-old’s mind flourished in open ground. My task: listen, perhaps drop a few nutrient-rich seeds, and let imagination breathe in that rich, deep mind-soil he tended.²

“Thanks for asking,” I said. “I love this question. I wonder about it daily, and still have no real knowing. No one does for sure.”

He nodded, unfazed. I volleyed back: “What do you think happens?”

He scrunched his face thoughtfully, eyes grinning in the half-light. “I don’t know. But I’m curious to find out… Actually, I’m excited about it.”

A pause snuggled between us. Did he mean soon?

“But not yet,” he added, catching my thought. “Not too soon. Because what if nothing happens? Then I wouldn’t get to live.”

Death, it turns out, makes excellent bedtime conversation when you’re seven-turning-eight. No existential dread, philosophical posturing, or religious hand-wringing. Just unobstructed wonderment about life’s confounding exit strategy.

His curiosity carried caution while his wonder acknowledged gravity, all without contradiction. He sensed what adults struggle to accept: paradox. He carried no fear into it. No one had handed him an answer to defend, so nothing in him flinched. He held presence and absence at once, and that holding opened ground where opposites root and grow together.

I felt Heraclitus murmur over my shoulder: “The harmony of the world is a harmony of opposites, like the bow and the lyre.”³ The lyre sings when its strings pull against each other. The bow sends arrows when its string strains against the curve. Tension allows possibility.

In Greek, biós means bow and bíos means life; a mere accent shifts meaning. The first is a weapon, its power drawn from strain. The second is a lifetime, a mode of living, the daily arc we trace between rising and resting. Heraclitus summarily wordplayed: “The name of the bow (biós) is life (bíos), but its work is death.”⁴ One word, two forms: life stretched between creation and undoing, each drawn by the same string.

This twilight wonderer held something and nothing, extending life’s pull in both directions without flinching.

“Maybe we become everything?” I offered when he nodded for my thoughts. “Or nothing,” flexing into his earlier suggestion. “Or, perhaps we return to whatever we were before arriving here?”

He narrowed his eyes along the lamplight stretching across the wall toward the window, then looked at me.

“Maybe we go into that light,” he gestured. “Or become part of the window. Or, maybe, could we go into someone’s eyes?”

I picked my jaw up off the pillow.

Light. Window. Eye. Three ancient portals drawn casually from his room. Sufficiently ordinary portals humans have long used to glimpse what lies beyond – and within. He mapped transcendence as he waltzed between whole and part and whole. No gleaning from preordained teachings, just accepting the room’s offerings as metaphysical fodder. A seven-year-old’s bedtime magic.

He explored existence through what was at hand. Immediate experience greeting infinite mystery under the soft pull of a crooked bedside wall lamp. This wasn’t Brick Tamland in Anchorman, pointing at furniture around the room: “I love lamp.”⁵ He pointed at the window, the light, and his eye and found a portal. I do love that lamp.

Like the bow and lyre pulled taut, each threshold draws potential between what’s seen and what’s never fully known. A synthesis unfettered minds naturally uncover. He took the whole of death, broke it into a light and a window and an eye, then folded those three into something none of them was alone. Whole, to parts, to a richer whole.

Understanding moves like this: we meet a thing entire, break it into pieces we can hold, then let the pieces find each other and rejoin, changed. Philosophers named this turning the hermeneutic spiral. My seven-year-old ran it in toothpaste-splotched pajamas.

He followed the music beyond the measures where adults often stall: in stanzas of graspable pieces where we fragment into certainty and lose the composition. We forget the song as we stiffen into single notes, and let melody move on without us.

In receding twilight, our ideas germinate between mind-space portals. Resonance emerges through the long song of silence spread across the empty prose of meaning. Empty the way that mind-soil lies empty: quiet on the surface, seeded underneath.

Neuroscience affirms what mystics and poets have sung for millennia: meaning and understanding live in and emerge through betweenness.⁶ The generative space where tension hums with creative possibility. It moves the way resonating bows do, one string waking another.

I glimpsed Heraclitus again grinning in the corner of my thought as this child held the bow of life and death in the same breath: “time is a game played beautifully by children” (my emphasis).⁷ This young mind embodied this as he approached eternity with the same playful seriousness he brought to Legos. Perhaps children understand time differently because they haven’t yet learned to fear it?

“What is this, anyway?” he pondered aloud.

I couldn’t answer, so I reached for an observation that Carl Jung surfaced simply: “life is a brief pause between two great mysteries.”⁸ I suggested that perhaps our task might be to illuminate this pause with our potential.

He nodded. He already was this insight. Decades of seeking brought me here by the long road. He arrived between brushing his teeth and asking for water.

Naturally ouroborosing the conversation, I asked, “What do you think happens before we arrive here? You know, before we were born?”

He paused, then shrugged. “Maybe the same as what we go into later? Or nothing?”

I couldn’t help but pepper our philosophical salad with a dash of Heidegger’s Geworfenheit: our “thrownness” into existence.⁹ We arrive here without choosing or explanation, facing a world shaped by circumstances we didn’t create.

Giving the salad another toss, I suggested we uncover our thrownness as we live into life’s questions, cocreating experience as we shape and are shaped by our encounters. Our freedom rests in how we attend to this thrownness and participate with what wants to emerge through us.

He nodded knowingly, as if I’d merely confirmed longtime suspicions.

I wasn’t even sure I knew what I just said. Philosophy sounds profound when tossing around word salads. Seven-year-olds, mercifully, don’t seem to mind. They’re too busy living while we just talk about it. Humbled and encouraged, I realized I’d offered compressed wisdom to someone who embodied it naturally.

Children see truths adults often forget, buried under social conditioning and inherited beliefs. My brother and I wrestled with these mysteries at his age, weighted down by the solemn certitudes of heaven and hell our religious upbringing furnished. This young seeker swam freer with fewer prescribed buoys to paddle around. Not knowing was an “answer.” When we relax our habitual reach for sureness, quiet wisdom serves as shoreline.

We were swimming with uncertainty, and the water was lukewarm.

The waters of imperfect knowing offer swimming lessons as life is, full of complexities and strange surprises.¹⁰ The virtue of mortality’s mystery releases us from fear’s confines and the degradation certainty most certainly delivers. Choices matter because time does, and each choice is a movement with living rather than waiting. Get off the banks and wade into the water.

We are the permission to grow. Seeds don’t ask for permission, they just do.¹¹ They grow into whatever it is they were already becoming.

Freedom’s tucked into that growing as we coauthor life spread across the stories we invent.¹² Permission to write comes from the simple fact of being here, thrown into this luminous pause between mysteries.

Twilight conversations expose how reality forms differently around the day’s edges, neither fully light nor dark but a merging between. A threshold that shapes existence itself.

Betweenness lives where opposites extend toward each other, letting something new vibrate. Like music, it’s born in relation: between notes and silence, tension and release. Meaning rides the resonance that breathes the whole, reality pulsing through relationships where each note depends on the others.

Science keeps arriving at this terrain and finding the mystics already camped there. It shows up with sharper tools, and every instrument turns out to be a portal.

Iain McGilchrist, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, spent decades watching how the brain attends, and calls betweenness the living interval that generates understanding.¹³

In 1974, Lewis Thomas, a cell biologist, stared down his microscope long enough for it to become a window: he looked up and saw Earth itself as one living cell, humanity tucked inside its membrane.¹⁴

Carlo Rovelli, a quantum physicist, followed matter down to the smallest scale we can measure and found no things at all, only relationships. No interaction, no fact of the matter.¹⁵ A neuroscientist, a biologist, a physicist (no, this isn’t the beginning of a joke): different light, different window, different eye, all humming a tune Heraclitus carried twenty-five centuries ago. From mitochondria to ecosystems to the cosmos, relationships vibrate all the way down and all the way up.

Indeed, it’s the relation between neurons where meaning sparks, the silence between heartbeats where life unfolds, the interconnected space between self and other where love arises. Science, in its most poetic moments, hums along with what mystics have long known: the pulse of life emerges from the currents between things, not from the things themselves.

Betweenness offers ways of seeing. Erwin Chargaff, a twentieth-century biochemist with a poet's grudge, said the “great biologists worked in the very light of darkness. We have been deprived of this fertile light.”¹⁶ Too much analytic glare blinds us to what actually lives before us.

Chargaff pictured a flashlight beam in a lumber room: useful, yes, yet narrowly fixed on individual boards and beams. Only when our eyes soften to the dark does a vaster architecture appear around and above.

Everything, he warned, has been dragged into the self-conscious, verbalized, analytic way of thinking. Our hunger for certainty and “knowing” often dries out the very field that yields wisdom. The fertile light of night lies in the contours of darkness.

A century and a half earlier, the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel sensed the same rhythm when he wrote, “the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.”¹⁷ Watchful wisdom takes flight at twilight, when day bends toward night. The middling hours unveil potential often concealed in the fixed brightness of noon or the blind weight of midnight. Imagination and wisdom soar in the charged interval where light and dark dissolve into each other. Opposites transcend in betweenness.

The day’s edges invite us to linger, to dwell in that generative space instead of rushing through to conclusions. Something vital stirs between knowing and unknowing, self and world, question and answer, light and dark. Clarity ripens in its own season, and, more importantly, when we’re ready to receive it.

My friend and mentor once told me, “the in-between is where we learn to love the questions as much or more than the answers. Living our clunky, chunky lives not for others but for our better selves, which is the best show of love we can make to others.”¹⁸ Yes. It reminds me that love flies in the dusk, that uncertain air between what we hold and must release. The dwelling in betweenness.

In betweenness, where dynamic relationships construct our experience of reality, I’ve come to recognize three values that seem to underwrite nature’s movements:

1. Generosity: potential offered without demand. The gift opens the space where everything else can happen.

2. Resonance: life vibrates in interdependent relationships, where pattern answers pattern. Pluck one string and another hums.

3. Harmony: opposites joined into something richer than their parts. It plays through tension, not around it.

The three portals offer ways of living with these values. Light, window, and eye become instruments themselves, chambers through which notes resound and carry. In them, the classical ideals shift shape and carry a modified sound. Goodness becomes generosity embodied. Truth becomes resonance felt. Beauty becomes harmony unveiled. The trifecta of nature’s music.

That music calls for response. As Marc Scibilia sings in “More to This,” a song born from his own daughter’s question about death, “the questions beg an answer, like a song begs a dancer.”¹⁹ A dancer, after all, moves with music, in step yet separate. We join life’s choir and move along its song. As questions beg, we sing our stanza in the key we can, try a melody, and hold our note as long as breath allows. We let go while holding on.

We learn to cradle the question even as answers brush the surface. We take a beat and rest beyond certainty in that open field where harmony vibrates and generous questions unfold into more generous ones. Life is abundant.

Nature’s song reminds us that singing with questions and dancing with answers matters more than pinning them down. Aliveness shapes through resonance, not certainty.

We left our conversation unfinished, held in generous silence where understanding unfolds. No tidy conclusions.

“This process isn’t asking for my meddling,” I thought to myself, as echoes of Jungian analyst James Hollis surfaced: “Beware of those who offer answers. They may be sincere, but their answers are not necessarily yours.”²⁰

My potential manifests when I keep the fertile field open to let seeds do their seeding. When I resist adding to cycles of tribal conditioning, young minds stretch toward their fullest imaginative reach.

If I allow potential room to manifest at its natural pace, imagination breathes in its ever-changing becoming. A becoming where harmony re-forms, and so often yields beautiful ruptures.

The lamp’s low glow shifted, casting new shadows across familiar walls. The room held open its portals. And somewhere in the dark the bow called life hummed with possibility.

As our conversation drifted into night, he rolled onto his side, content with frayed, untied threads. The lamp sputtered against the darkened wall as the window quietly mirrored its stillness. His eyes closed, but his wonder stayed open.

In that good, unsettled space we softly inched closer to truth. A truth not of answers but of askings held with care. Our small contribution to the endless spiral connecting child to cosmos, question to quest, finite thought to infinite mystery. A taste of the beautiful, unfinished business of the universe.

If we resist our urge to define and fix things, to pin down the unknowable into neat little boxes, and instead learn to swim with uncertainty, we might just glimpse again the quiet wisdom of unencumbered minds. In betweenness, where breath meets world and self discovers other, nature reveals itself as endlessly generous with potential, resonant in relationship, and harmonious in its tensions.

At last, we return to the day’s edge, where dusk exhales and light bends toward dark, presence presses into absence, and answers dissolve into questions. Twilight holds the field where wisdom takes flight, imagination breathes, and love unveils itself as the luminous potential between mysteries.

So... what does happen when we die?

NOTES

¹ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Ulrich Baer (Warbler Classics, 2022), 30. My conversation with my son unfolded in that same falling dusk, when external roles slipped away and relationship came quietly alight at the day’s edge.

² Growing up, my older brother used the phrase “let imagination breathe” in his art, poetry, and music. This is a nod to that enduring mindset. You can follow his work on Instagram @solomonbehnke.

³ Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 37, fragment 56. Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535–c. 475 BCE), often called “the Obscure,” left only fragments, yet his vision of flux, tension, unity of opposites, and logos shaped philosophy from the Stoics to Hegel to Nietzsche, and, humbly to me. Logos refers to the rational, ordering principle of the universe that structures and governs all of reality. He often linked flux and logos to fire as a symbol of constant transformation. His river image, “you cannot step twice into the same river,” still echoes as shorthand for reality’s ceaseless change.

⁴ Heraclitus, fragment 64 (=B48), quoted in S. Marc Cohen, Heraclitus Lecture, University of Washington, last updated September 21, 2016, accessed August 15, 2025, https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/heracli.htm.

⁵ “I love lamp – Anchorman,” Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, YouTube video, August 1, 2013,

⁶ Stephen Grossberg, “The Resonant Brain: How Attentive Conscious Seeing Regulates Action Sequences That Interact with Attentive Cognitive Learning, Recognition, and Prediction,” Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 81, no. 7 (2019): 2237–2264, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01789-2.

⁷ Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 51, fragment 79.

⁸ Carl Jung, quoted in James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2018), 79.

⁹ William Blattner, Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’: A Reader’s Guide, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023); Robert G. Fox, “On Thrownness,” International Focusing Institute, accessed August 3, 2025, https://focusing.org/articles/thrownness.

¹⁰ Again I find James Hollis writings inspiring and succinct. I drew bits of these ideas in this paragraph from his work, Living an Examined Life, 79, 96.

¹¹ This line was directly inspired by the elegantly moving song by Luis Berra, “Seeds Don’t Ask for Permission,” released May 29, 2020. Spotify.

¹² The poetry put to beats by the artist Mindchatter inspired this line. See Mindchatter, “Don’t Trust A Thought,” Maison Arts, released August 15, 2025, Spotify,

¹³ Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021). For more discussion on the topic see: Elizabeth Oldfield, “Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain and Perceiving the Sacred,” Theos Think Tank, November 1, 2023, https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2023/11/01/iain-mcgilchrist-on-the-divided-brain-and-perceiving-the-sacred and Jenny Mackness, “Understanding Betweenness – Seeing Beyond the Parts,” Jenny Mackness Blog, October 10, 2018, https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/understanding-betweenness-seeing-beyond-the-parts/.

¹⁴ Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1974).

¹⁵ I refer here to the primacy of relations: the view that reality is fundamentally relational, and that individual "things" arise from relationships rather than the other way around. Relationship precedes relata. A "self" and an "other" emerge within their relation rather than existing first as separate entities that later connect. The idea echoes across disciplines: Iain McGilchrist's relational model of knowing, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's theology of evolutionary convergence, and Carlo Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics, which proposes that physical properties exist only in relation to other systems. For an accessible entry, see Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell (New York: Riverhead Books, 2021). Some push the resonance further still: the biologist Rupert Sheldrake's speculative hypothesis of morphic resonance imagines nature carrying memory through resonant fields, pattern answering pattern across time. Mainstream science keeps Sheldrake at arm's length, and I flag him here as an evocative outlier rather than settled ground. Either way, reality reads less like a collection of isolated particles and more like a field of dynamic connections.

¹⁶ Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life before Nature (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1978), 107.

¹⁷ In Roman mythology, Minerva was the goddess of wisdom, strategy, and the arts, identified with the Greek Athena. Hegel’s image of the “owl of Minerva” reflects wisdom’s retrospective nature. Philosophy often spreads its wings only in twilight, after life’s events have already unfolded. See: G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23.

¹⁸ Dr. Joseph McGill, text message to author, August 2025. Dr. McGill is a personal friend and mentor.

¹⁹ Marc Scibilia, “More to This” (Nashville: Good Lander Records, 2024), Spotify,

²⁰ Hollis, Living an Examined Life, 4.

Share

Leave a comment

Share Attending the Days: Essays from Lifelook

What was scattered, gathers. What was gathered, blows apart. – Heraclitus (fr. 40)1

A few months before Anne died, we stood in her kitchen. It was late October, one of those soft, early evenings when the light had already decided to leave, retreating through the window in long, half-hearted lines. I closed her laptop, problem solved, and hung up my “tech support” hat for the night. I just needed to tend to a few more things in her space before wrapping up. Upstairs, the muffled sounds of my children drifted downward: bath water started, voices soft, the small rituals of bedtime in motion.

Anne, my mother-in-law, joined our home three years earlier, transforming us from a family of four into a fuller five. In short order, we learned how to move around and with each other, sometimes closely knit, sometimes slipping quietly into our own routines, all of us shaped by the welcomed contours of shared, generational living.

“How are you doing?” I asked, half-distracted, changing the garbage bin, and already mentally scrolling through which bedtime stories or meditations might settle the kids (and myself).

“Fine,” she said, her usual even tone. “Fine” was her natural, regular default response. And I often accepted that, trusting she would say otherwise if that were not the case. “Tired” or “Fine” were reliable signals.

Yet something in her voice gave me pause. I turned slowly toward her, my hand still on the counter at the opposite end of where she leaned. Our eyes met.

“Anne, how are you really doing?” I asked again, softly, insistently.

She glanced away, inhaled deeply, held it for a moment, then exhaled slowly. The kitchen seemed to expand and shrink with her breath. Our eyes reconnected.

“Liberated,” she said.

Time suspended. The room changed, yet nothing happened. The background noise of the house, the running water upstairs, the distant voices of my children, faded. A quiet clarity filled the space between us, as if the air itself had thinned. I stood still, not wanting to disturb whatever just opened between us.

The refrigerator hummed. The clock ticked its tock over my left shoulder. Beyond the window, the low evening light slipped deeper into silence. “Liberated” converted the space between us, invisibly hovering in the quietness, undeniable in its force. For those few extraordinary moments, we shared something beautifully ineffable yet elegantly clarified.

Eventually, reluctantly, I broke the spell. “What does that mean?” I asked, my voice swallowed by the space.

She declined to elaborate. Her voice gentle, a bit staggered by her underlying condition yet determined: “I just… feel… liberated.”

I nodded, sensing that pressing further would diminish this, this something important. We stayed in that moment together, the word hanging between us like a delicate thread strung between two realities. Mine, bound to laundry, bedtimes, bills, careers, the dog, things to do, the endless list. Hers, already loosening from lists, from attachments, from associations, she loosened from more.

Four months later, after she died, I understood the depth of generosity she shared with me that evening in the kitchen: the clarity that comes from releasing everything we think we are. The freedom encountered through forms of acceptance.

She knew. And probably for quite some time.

Her final weeks unfolded as close to her plans as one could wish.

Anne lived seven years with a rare neurological disorder that slowly eroded her body but left her mind intact. The cruelty of her disease lay in this awareness: the mind remained sharp while the body rebelled. After several years of navigating her debilitating condition, the physical falling apart had taken its toll. She struggled to speak and swallow. Her mobility narrowed to a stiff shuffle. The window of her defined quality of life was shuttering.

In early January, she chose to stop eating and drinking: a final act of clarity, an act of freedom. She started her final decision on Wednesday night. By Saturday, she transitioned from palliative to hospice care. One of the nurses informed us people who stop eating and drinking usually pass within one to two weeks. Anne died eight days later, following her own timeline just as she had throughout much of her life. She released with love and peace in her own bed at her own home in her own way.

Hospice offered guidance, a light gravity on the periphery, while we attended through the days and nights. My spouse slept beside Anne those first few evenings, both of us moving between vigilance and exhaustion learning how love changes shape in the shadow of departure. The hospice nurse checked in, never in a hurry, helping us trust that nothing urgent needed fixing. As the death doula visited us, her presence gentle and practical, she invited us to notice what mattered most, and to let the rest fall away. Their calm steadied us, but Anne set the rhythm. Her quiet grace in the face of everything held those seemingly endless days.

Even as her body weakened, her spirit held the room together. Together, our hands, our voices, our tears, our smiles, our being held each other through each uncertain hour. In the hush of that care, ours, theirs, hers, a different kind of presence peeked through, one you feel most keenly when the world narrows to a single bedside and the hours drift between memory and what’s next.

During those final days, we bore witness to the quiet unraveling of bodily form and to the deepening presence that revealed itself behind it. Dying arrives as a process, a gradual shedding: earth, water, fire, air. Frank Ostaseski sat with the dying for decades in his Zen Hospice center, and watched them leave in that order.2 These elements represent more than metaphors or representations of things. They offer a lived vocabulary for the experience of witnessing a person disappear from physical form while growing somehow brighter in the immaterial.

It is said that when we die, body and mind unravel together in a shared, interdependent process of cocreation and destruction. Four elements form and release, refolding and unfolding. Earth, water, fire, and air reach past the body’s structure. They shape our emotions, our thoughts, even our creativity. Earth holds firmness and tenderness, steadiness and give. Water carries cohesion and flow, flexibility and constancy. Fire swings between warmth and intensity. Air moves between stillness and motion. These forces rise and recede together, the way breath follows heartbeat, the way living and letting go always stay in conversation.3

First, Anne’s body lost solidity. Her legs weakened. Her foundation caved. This is earth dissolving. Her previously grounded presence, always gentle yet persistent, softened into the bed beneath her. Her hands, once firm enough to work her sewing magic, prune her plants, and manage a sprawling Human Resources team, now rested lightly on the sheets, barely making an impression. The hardness of bone and muscle yielded to gravity.

Water followed. Her circulation slowed. Her ability to swallow waned. Her speech became infrequent, then sparse. Like a glacier calving into the sea, parts of her that once held shape and function quietly slipped away. Her ability to connect a thought to the next thought, to flow from one topic to another, gradually stilled. And yet, she radiated warmth whenever her daughter, the grandkids, or I entered the room. Her eyes followed us, a quiet current of attention barely flowing beneath the surface.

Then came the fire. The metabolic flickering. Her temperature fluctuated. Her energy, once enough to sit upright and smile, turned inward. That inner heat, previously a source of love and tenacity, gathered at her core like dying embers on a cold night.

Scientists explain that we contain atoms forged in stellar explosions billions of years ago: the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, all created in the heart of dying stars. Big bang. Converted potential. Consciousness repurposed. The dynamic cycle of cocreation and destruction. Poets reach for similar explanations through different language: we are fallen or dimmed light, cosmic fire cooled into temporary form. Science and art arrive at the same realization through different paths: we’re brief arrangements of borrowed elements, a momentary congregation of stardust that eventually rejoins the universe that shaped us. Life and death cocreate form and release, unfolding and refolding.

We are temporary arrangements of ancient elements.

Anne’s fire element began its return journey, the cooling beginning at her extremities, moving slowly inward, as if her life force were condensing to its essential nature.

Eventually, fire gave way to air. Breathing became shallow, then erratic. Long pauses filled the room between breaths. No distress, no struggle for oxygen, just space gradually replacing rhythm. We found ourselves unconsciously matching our breath to hers, then holding it during those extended pauses, as if collectively participating in the gradual loosening of her from life.

And then came stillness.

In that sacred space between her final breath and what followed, I experienced the awesome power of being with someone becoming nonbeing. Someone un-becoming. Someone refolding into themselves. Someone returning. Someone I loved and knew loved me and our family with all her might. Her might, powerfully yielding to returning. Words can’t capture the essence of this transition, this turning within stillness back toward origin that embodies the cyclical nature of existence itself. Beauty manifesting and unmanifesting.

Our elements dissolve. Our essence reimagined.

The ancient wisdom traditions describe this process with elegant simplicity: earth yields to water, water transforms to fire, fire dissolves into air, air expands into space, and space opens to pure consciousness.4 What remains is more than absence. It’s a subtle presence that permeates the room, something undeniable yet unmeasurable, recognized not by instruments but by something within us that knows it immediately. Consciousness transformed well beyond our linguistic grasp.

The doings of nature leave “footprints” behind. Like the wet ground after the rain stops. Or at the beach where your foot imprints in wet sand. When we die, our body is the vestige of our previous doings that linger after nature stops its dissociative process.5

Dying doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a gradual withdrawal from life and form. It’s a dissolution of our ego. The four elements dissolving name something ineffable and observable at once: those animating qualities so conspicuously absent in the body afterward. Science measures the physical disintegration with precision, but the inner dissolution happening simultaneously remains subtle and still. Our instruments capture data but not the mystery.

The Tao Te Ching offers this wisdom:

The returning is the movement of the Tao.
The weak is the utilization of the Tao.

The myriad things of the world are born of being;
Being is born of nonbeing.6

We can interpret this passage as a gesture to the rhythm of return, the movement of all things back to source.7 “The weak” does not mean feeble, but soft, yielding, adaptable. This flexible pliancy characterizes what propels life forward. In a sense, it’s the aspects of those four elements of existence. Living things bend and adjust. The stiff and unyielding, like dried branches, break under pressure.

This applies equally to our minds. An awareness in tune with Nature bends like a young sapling in strong winds: responsive, curious, and alive to possibility.8 But a mind that grips its certainties like talismans, that reflexively barricades itself against unfamiliar ideas? That mind has already completed a kind of death. The body walks, talks, scrolls through endless feeds, but some essential animating force has weakened, or nearly departed.

We’ve created a peculiar modern condition where many of us move as if half-asleep, drifting through days like unconscious, living corpses. The zombie apocalypse isn’t coming, it’s here. It’s here in our rigid thinking, our mindless scrolling, our poverty of attention, our reflexive rejections, our desperate clinging to what we imagine is permanent when nothing is.

This disease of distraction narrows our mental airways and disrupts our breathing, stifling the vitality that could expand our lifescape. Avoidance collapses our lungs, leaving us breathless, while awareness lights the breaths we still hold and release. We scroll past horizons that might have widened us. We can feel, paradoxically, more absent than those who have already died yet faced impermanence with open awareness.

The Tibetan yogi Milarepa reminded his students that the corpse we fear “is living with us here and now,” present in every breath and heartbeat.9 Death is not an event waiting somewhere in the distance, it moves with us. It rides the morning commute, sits across from us at lunch, lingers through the evening meal, and tucks in beside us at night.

Life carries death as its companion. Rather than diminish life’s light, this companionship deepens and expands it. When we recognize that death is certain in its coming and unknowable in its hour, we stop postponing the reckoning. We stop playing peek-a-boo with the universe, covering our eyes as though what we refuse to see cannot find us. We can walk with paradox: death is always near, and therefore so is life.

Anne lived with this awareness. While disease narrowed her healthspan, her openness widened her horizon and expanded her lifescape. Each breath carried more weight, each step more fragility, each moment more radiance. Where our culture suffers a dis-ease of avoidance, she turned toward what we fear most, carrying dying alongside living. In that companionship she revealed the strength to release, the grace to return, and the love that somehow grew firmer as her form dissolved.

Gradually, Anne’s body, once soft, pliant, resilient yet responsive to change, became hard and stiff. The flower of death bloomed inside her. While her mind remained clear and open until nearly the end, her body cooled and stiffened. She played, in every way, her part of the cycle of return. Being becoming nonbeing.

In her final days, resistance ceased. Her awareness thinned like morning fog as we felt her presence swell, then recede. She seemed to dissolve into the space she once occupied, like steam from a kettle dissipating into air, no longer visible, but still somehow there.

As a species, when we trace our origins back, we eventually realize we existed first as nothing but pure potential. Our being (or existence) emerges from nonbeing (or nonexistence). This realization counteracts our worldly attachments, physical and mental. When we truly grasp this, our clinging makes no sense at all. Anne embodied this understanding and shared that insight with me in her kitchen that evening months before, and even more fully in her final days, holding nothing, resisting nothing, simply being the beauty of return.

There were no universally understood metaphysical claims in our shared household, no dogmatic assertions about what happens after death. We don’t know. Claims on such certainty degrade the intrinsic Mystery of things. But there was something felt in our heartbeats. An intuition. A soft, resonant experience that transcended our usual categories of thought.

Even the skeptical among us, who hold no belief in subtle consciousness or something beyond the physical, perceive something radiant about the quality of existence. And when we open ourselves up to the presence of our inner radiance and understand that radiance resides in those around us, we can tap deeper into the incomprehensible mysteries of existence.

These subtle aspects of being become more available as death closes in. There’s a perceptible shift in the texture of presence. Not necessarily supernatural, but undeniably real, a clarity or luminosity that emerges as physical form recedes. Our vocabulary falters when trying to capture these “this” moments. We reach for words like “presence” or “essence,” then recognize their inadequacy and fall silent. Perhaps that’s the this: acknowledging that direct experience transcends our explanatory frameworks. What we witness and experience matters more than (and with) our ability to categorize and measure.

What becomes undeniable when sitting with the dying is that impermanence forms the bedrock of existence. Life constantly comes together and falls apart. At death, sure, but also always. We generally agree that life flows in constant flux, yet cling to the illusion that we ourselves are solid entities moving through a changing world. “Everything is changing except me,” we tell ourselves. While true at some level, we entangle meanings. We are not the roles we play: accountant, teacher, lawyer, landscaper, parent, writer. We are, like everything else, simultaneously here and disappearing. And we’ll find, as Ostaseski writes, “The more permeable we become, the more we realize that we are just bundles of ever-changing conditions.”10

When we relax our grasp and flow with flux, we open to the wider plane of awareness. Sometimes in our openness, we brush the ineffable. Sometimes we sense the sacred.

Anne’s dying illuminated this: the collapsing of identity, the dissolving of form, and yet, somehow, the amplification of love.

True longevity is not breath prolonged but meaning that endures. Memory that lives on in others. Influence that persists beyond physical presence. An imprint’s soft, fading persistence. A shared resonance. The Tao Te Ching reminds us, “Those who do not lose their base endure. Those who die but do not perish have longevity.”11

In the months following her death, I found myself less wedded to being somebody. My personality or identity sometimes felt like a balloon I had become breathless constantly trying to inflate. As I reevaluated and internalized the fragility and meaning of my own life, I softened. I yielded a bit more. I felt more porous, more transparent, more permeable to experience. A feeling of aliveness. Anne’s imprint enduring.

The Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi captured this fluidity of self with striking simplicity: “What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.”12 This image stays with me: a static doorway in perpetual motion, a threshold continually crossed. When we relax our grip on who we think we are, we expand. The borders thin. At first, this openness feels exposing, even dangerous, but given time, it transforms into a peculiar freedom swinging through thresholds. Permeations uncovered.

Anne didn’t perish. She transformed fully into the mystery. She released. And in that release, she left behind something we can only call beautiful. Not clean, not easy, yet radiant in its clarity and mystery. She inhabited her part of the return.

Heraclitus’ words resurface here: “What was scattered, gathers. What was gathered, blows apart.”13 In the river of life where Anne set her feet, she’s now gone, dissipated into a mere imprint, those waters giving way to this, now this.14 Each moment gathers and dissolves, no two the same, and yet each a return.

Our shared impermanence draws us closer. When we recognize, then abide with, the fragile, temporary nature of our lives, artificial barriers dissolve. Compassion flows from knowing we belong, together, within a greater field of being. Empathy courses naturally from understanding that we all move to the same cosmic rhythm of emergence and return. Relationships flourish within our unified sense of Being.

Our separateness is illusory; our connectedness closer to reality. We arise within a unified field of existence, endlessly refracting itself through each life and death, each gathering and return.

Awareness is at the bottom of everything: consciousness is all there is.15

We do not live as isolated selves. We are both the ocean and the wave, the background and the foreground of every story we tell ourselves stretched across existence. Matter and consciousness move as two faces of the same underlying reality, like water shifting forms: sometimes vapor, sometimes ice, sometimes flowing clear in the stream. Experience, in all its ordinary and extraordinary textures, arises from this depth.

We belong to each other and to everything and to nothing, bound together by the very impermanence and mystery we so often ignore or fear. When we accept this, a peculiar freedom grows: presence widens, release becomes realized, and this moment accepts the past and stands as the only reality we possess. We realize we are mystery. It lives through us. This was Anne’s abiding act of generosity. It was her liberation. My reminder.

What remains moves beyond the stories we share about her, and ourselves. It’s the space she shapes in living and dying; a space that teaches how to exist with more softness, more permeability, more presence. A space where we might unveil our own purpose, realize our own liberation, and wake up. Death reminds us. Memento mori.16

Twenty years ago, I met that reminder carved into wood in a Buddhist temple in London.

It was 2006, I was twenty-something years old, midway through my undergraduate studies, naïve, likely a bit arrogant, and ravenous for knowledge. My exploratory intellectual path began years earlier when Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces landed in my hands during a high school library peruse, detonating my provincial worldview. Though raised in a Christian household, Campbell exploded open doors to ancient Eastern and Indigenous philosophies that my parochial education and upbringing barely acknowledged. While the concept of life cycles wasn’t new to me, London offered direct, embodied engagement with ways beyond my existing, provincial worldview, and I absorbed them eagerly.

During my first encounter with a Buddhist service, I noticed a wooden block — the han — hanging near the entrance. It captured my curiosity and wonder. Afterward, during otoki, the communal meal where practitioners and visitors share food and conversation, I asked a monk about it. As he patiently showed me how to hold and use my chopsticks properly, he explained the han’s purpose: to call practitioners to meditation. After our meal, he guided me back to the entrance and showed me the characters carved into its surface:

Great is the matter of birth and death
Time swiftly passes by
Wake up, each one
Don’t squander your life

The words landed. But what affected me most was what the monk showed me next. Where the mallet had struck the block over decades, the wood had hollowed. The characters faded into it. The explicit enfolding back into implicit. Each strike wore away a little more of Time swiftly passes by. The block practiced what it preached.

Nothing solid stays solid. We wear away.

Wake up. Time swiftly passes by.

This struck me with unexpected and enduring force. Despite my philosophical tendencies and religious upbringing, impermanence sort of remained separate and abstract, an intellectual concept rather than a lived truth. But that han somehow made it real: a physical object gradually disappearing through intentional use, its very purpose accelerating its transformation. The block absorbed its dissolution and embodied its message through its changing form.

Glimpses of our transient nature often arrive unexpectedly, sometimes as we attend to the mundane, more resonant in moments of disruption or loss. Insights await everywhere, available in this breath, this heartbeat, this kitchen conversation. Not reserved for some distant enlightenment or final release. Now is that moment you’ve been telling yourself you’ve been waiting for. You’re already standing at the corner the thing is just around. Pick your path and start walking. Don’t wait.

Looking back, I see how Anne’s kitchen revelation ignited my second han. Like the strike of wood on wood, a sound that wears into silence as its echoes hollow out what I thought I knew. A flash of consciousness uncovered through a single word. The sound lingered, just as the wood of that London han had worn thin with years of striking, both reminders that impermanence leaves its mark, carving silence and meaning at once. Imprints in the folds of memory.

Anne’s generosity, sculpted and lived through a single word, uncovered a sense of truth I feel beyond intellectualizing. Like Campbell’s books that once shattered my parochial worldview, her “liberated” sparked a return of my attention to something enduring in me that was there all along, a kind of abiding you can forget even as you live within it.

She offered me my second han, a wearing down into something more open, steady, and awake. Like that monk in London who repositioned the chopsticks of impermanence in my hand, she revealed how to hold what slips away while still keeping close the pieces that matter. And together, these encounters, separated by decades, press me through thresholds, doors swinging open and close.

Anne knows. She is released. She is returned. She is liberated.

And in witnessing her liberation, I brush against the possibility of my own.

So, what happens when we let go?

Share

Share Attending the Days: Essays from Lifelook

Leave a comment

REFERENCES

Explore more from Lifelook

Subscribe now

Most days, it sneaks up on me.

Not so much the news anymore, as every day broadcasts something “unprecedented,” and the inbox rarely rattles me. I quit doom‑scrolling years ago, broke up with social media over a decade ago, and try to treat slow traffic as free‑range thinking time. My children, meanwhile, continue to expand their appreciation for the range and “flexibility” of certain choice words, thanks to my ongoing field‑testing of patience.

And the hooks still drop.

Even around the arts and crafts area where a child's well-meant "organization" detonates the logic of crayon, glue sticks, and rainbow loom bands. Or when half the toothpaste tube takes up residence on the back side of the hand towel I just assumed was for drying hands. The familiar spark arrives and tightens my temples, furrows my brow, and triggers my urge to leap in, correct, and fix. A tidy sermon on minimalism leaps forward as an investigation into the mysterious case of the scattered paper scraps kicks off. Other times, the hook initiates versions of unsolicited wisdom on the lost art of not using the hand towel to mop up oversqueezed toothpaste. Whoever's around gets the free-flowing "wisdom" transfer.

Why do I still do this when I’d rather not be that version of myself? What’s my attachment to these responses?

There's a word for the hook. Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist nun, reaches for the Tibetan shenpa, “getting hooked.” It doesn’t translate neatly, but shenpa (say it shen-pah) is that subtle, sometimes hot, sticky urge that pulls us toward reactivity. It’s the primer behind our thoughts, words, and actions, that “charge behind ‘don’t like’ and ‘like,’” that sticky pull when we want things to go our way.¹ More than irritation, it's the hook that snags attention, spins a story, and, before I know it, has me halfway into an unnecessary lecture or muttered choice words. Sometimes, I check my heart rate just to see if my body is as hooked as my mind. Sometimes, I just sort of lose the thread mid-lecture because I forget why I'm so upset.

Chödrön calls it biting the hook, and I know the bloody taste all too well. The rush to tidy, correct, or control. The moment I’m hooked, my world narrows. Possibilities collapse. Senses falter. I become entangled in the contents of my reaction: a dad, a partner, a person making a case for order, while the moment itself slips away. “I am“ quietly yields to “I am upset,” or “I am cleaning,” or “I am a parent.” I become the feeling, the activity, or the relationship. Usually, someone wanders out of the room during this transformation, which is probably for the best.

The tangle runs deeper than one feeling or task. We build a whole story around it: I’m an upset but good parent, because I organize and I parent. The story swallows the awareness that held it. Rupert Spira, a potter turned teacher of awareness, keeps pointing at exactly this: tangle our awareness with the contents of experience, and we lose the presence of awareness itself.² Shenpa is our alert system that sounds before we vanish into the story.

When we blow past shenpa without pause, we drift a bit further from ourselves. The gap closes and fills with reactions not always of our choosing. The accumulation of these small, unnoticed acts can pull us apart from our true nature, or, when noticed, bring us back. We can disentangle from our contents. Shenpa offers momentary reminders that “I am,” rather than “I am [insert thing],” if we use that hot, sticky pull as a beacon of aliveness.

The pause allows space where we resonate with the full musical measure of our I-ness, the very knowing of our existence. Without this pause, noise and cacophony, our habitual reaction fill the space. As French composer Claude Debussy said, “Music is the space between the notes.” The very hook that threatens to snag us also signals the next note. Shenpa inspires that space between. We become the resonant chamber that offers our I-ness to sing its music.

Like any instrument, we sound rough at first. But each noticed shenpa offers a lesson, and slowly, ever so slowly, what once required white-knuckle effort becomes second-ish nature. The room within us settles.

Sometimes, on smoother days, or maybe just more attentive days, the practice shows. The hook dangles, and for a breath, I notice it. That’s the gap Chödrön describes in Practicing Peace. The sliver of space between sensation and story, trigger and response.

Sometimes, I even remember I can use those scattered, displaced kids’ paint brushes. Shenpa catches me tensing up, so I feel its rush and hold steady, and I choose a color. Most times, I reach for a dishtowel instead, or just start peeling dried glitter glue off my sock, but even that is a stroke in the picture. The space created when I recognize but don’t bite the hook gives me the chance to shape the mood, the tone, refine the melody, and maybe even the transition.

That’s the power of the pause. Naming its genesis allows potential its creative space. Shenpa gives me language for that elusive gap between thing and response. Once I name it, I can see it, then, maybe, I can tame it. With a concept in mind, I construct my perception, paint my interpretation, and describe the world I inhabit beyond mere reaction. And, to top off the concept cake, shenpa is a heckuva lot of fun to say, nearly satisfying that itch for other four-lettered choice words.

Science applauds the pause. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett found we can’t perceive what we don’t have a concept for.³ Our brains don’t only react to the world, they actively predict and construct it from the concepts we already carry. In the pause, inspired by our sense of shenpa, we give ourselves the chance to sift through entanglement, choose a new description, a new color for the moment at hand. We can modify our brain’s predictive power for the situation while seeding its interpretive pattern for meaning-making.

Choosing colors expands the view.

It’s rarely dramatic. Sometimes I pause because I fumble the marker cups or knock over a glue bottle and have to clean up some sparkly goo before saying anything. Sometimes I pause on purpose, supported by a deep breath or a slow count to three, a moment to remember that neither my kids nor I are on trial for craft supply chaos or marker mishaps. Occasionally, I just stare at the mess and hope it will sort itself out if I blink long enough.

In that pause, potential opens. I feel the contraction, the script about to start, the pull to react. If I stay there, just a beat longer, the urge softens. I don’t have to bite. I can breathe, notice my feet on the cool, sticky playroom floor, let the story drift through me. Sometimes, I even manage a smile and embrace the ridiculousness of my upsettedness: they’re freaking kids, man. Humor gives me the absurd perspective that often slips below the mess when I’m moving too fast and snagging dangling hooks. Other times, I say nothing at all and just listen to the clink of markers settling in the cup, trying to remember who taught me that messes are never permanent.

So, I keep trying. And lately, when I recognize my shenpa, I ask myself, “What’s this in service to?”⁴ It doesn’t always change the moment, but it tilts me toward curiosity. It colors the palette of my pause. It allows me to employ my shenpa in a way that better serves me. Sometimes the response is connection, sometimes it’s relief, sometimes it’s just the hope of fewer sticky hand towels next time. From this pause point, this space of momentary uncertainty yields freedom to choose my color, expand my options, and take in my view.

Each pause pans back the camera, and I see the wider room: the small humans elbow-deep in glue and glitter and loom bands, none of them troubled by whether it lands in the right cup, or any cup at all for that matter. Spira threw clay for twenty years to circle back to this. My kids haven't left the wheel. A spill becomes a lake. The bald patch on the page is where the dog will go. They don't fight the limits of the thing in front of them, they befriend it, and it turns into something else entirely because a kid absorbed in making has no self-story to defend. No “am I good at this,” no right cup. There never was one. Just doing. And redoing. Imagination on the loose.

That imaginative ease runs on the ever-present, unchanging I am, the same I-ness in them, in me, and in you, the true bassline Peter Russell calls “the heart of our being.”⁵ We can just be without becoming our contents. Brush the glitter from our feet, or twirl once and go.

The wisdom behind shenpa never asks for perfection. Hooks will land. Over and over. (Just ask my kids.) But perhaps the barbs sink in a bit less over time. It’s really more about seeing the urge to attach and choosing another path. We’re not perfect monks, yet I suspect we’re all humans who’d rather preserve connection than win the “organize the bin” battles, the petty and serviceless scenarios that populate our day.

And that’s the practice: not making enemies of our triggers, but greeting them with curiosity and care, even when our curiosity is mostly, “What’n the hell?! How would glitter glisten from there?!” It can lead to: “Why am I upset about it? Do I even need to fix it?”

This is where lifelook comes alive. Choice colors the view: I can’t always control what arrives, but I can choose how to attend, how to respond, and what meaning pulls to the surface as I move through each encounter with life.

So I pause. I notice the hook, nod to its persistence, and let it dangle while I step back into the wider field of experience. Some days, the best I do is ask what my response might serve.

The markers may not end up in the right cup. But the playroom sure feels a bit lighter.

NOTES:

¹ Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace (Boulder: Shambhala, 2006), see also: “How We Get Hooked and How We Get Unhooked,” Lion’s Roar, https://www.lionsroar.com/how-we-get-hooked-shenpa-and-how-we-get-unhooked/.

² Rupert Spira worked for years as a studio potter before he turned to teaching. He now points people back to awareness itself, the open space in which experience comes and goes. His steady claim: awareness is the one thing we never truly lose, only overlook. Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware(Oxford: Sahaja Publications; copublished by New Harbinger Publications, Oakland, CA, 2017), 45–57.

³ Research by psychologists like Lisa Feldman Barrett show our brains don’t just react to the world, they actively predict and construct it. Concepts allow us to interpret what would otherwise be meaningless patterns. Shenpa is our concept for that gap between sensing and response. You can’t perceive what you don’t have a concept for. Once you see it — like the blurry bee in Barrett’s experiment — you can never unsee it. In the pause, we give ourselves the chance to move through entanglement and choose a new description, a new color for the moment at hand. See: Lisa Feldman Barrett, interview by Niall McKeever, “How the Brain Creates Emotions,” The Weekend University, April 24, 2025 for source notes integrated above. For more of Dr. Barrett’s work, go to: https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/academic-papers/

⁴ James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2018).

⁵ I use I-ness the way Peter Russell does. The personal me changes with age, role, and mood. Beneath it sits the bare fact of being aware, the silent knowing in which every thought and feeling appears. Russell adds a startling turn: strip away every personal trait, and the I-ness left in you is the same as the I-ness in anyone. Peter Russell, Letting Go of Nothing: Relax Your Mind and Discover the Wonder of Your True Nature (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2021), 113.

Leave a comment

Share

Share Attending the Days: Essays from Lifelook

Explore more from Lifelook

Subscribe now

Most evenings I load the dishwasher.

Like a short-order cook at closing time: rinsing, stacking, sometimes muttering small apologies to the plates I promised I wouldn’t chip, or wondering why in the world someone placed that dish in that slot at that angle. But once in a while, the jerky, clattering movements downshift. I take a beat, and I notice the way warm water slides across porcelain, feel the pleasant click as a mug finds its place, and take quiet pride in a lineup of gleaming cutlery, every cup and plate in its glorious, designated slot.

It’s not a ritual I inherited. Nobody sat me down and taught the Way of the Bowl. Still, meaning sneaks into these small repetitions. The Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis kept finding it there too, tucked into the “small acts” of daily tending.1 Grand gestures don’t really surface all that often. The Tao slips past naming, yet moves through every detail, even the sound the dishwasher makes as it latches shut.2

There’s a certain comedy here, too. One of my Stoic heroes, Marcus Aurelius, faced the weight of empire, but I face the spray arm that seems to fall off when I look away.3 And the lesson lingers in a soft, wet tempo. Most of what needs attending doesn’t announce itself. We simply show up, suds and all, and pay a splash of attention.

In those moments, with one hand on a chipped plate, the other closing the door, I remember that clarity emerges naturally through rhythm, through motion, through not reaching for my phone while the wash cycle runs. I can’t force clarity, but I can tend to it. And then, briefly, I notice: I am.

For a breath, anyway, before the spray arm slips loose again.

If consciousness moves as the field of awareness, then this too is being aware: stacking bowls, arranging spoons, listening for the soft rumble as everything inside begins to transform.

Eventually, the cycle ends. I open the door and embrace the cloud of steam. I wipe my foggy glasses. It’s certainly not enlightenment, but the forks are clean and that’s usually enough for one evening.

Explore more Lifelook

Subscribe now

Sometimes a toothbrush is just a toothbrush. Sometimes it’s an everyday doorway to wonder dressed up in minty freshness in all its electrically powered glory waiting twice a day on the bathroom shelf. The brush hums quietly in its charger, ready for reveille.

Let’s tend to the dailies.

Most mornings we simply brush. Some nights we may skip, and we taste it the next day. Yet now and then the routine widens, standing half‑awake at the basin we realize: we’re here. One foot in dreamland, one foot in daylight, one hand on the basin and the other in the void.

Nothing too flashy. Just the whirr of electric Sonicare bristles slapping some enamel. The faint mint hit kicks the choice not to scroll. For sixty unhurried seconds podcasts stop, to-do lists lose their hook, thoughts pause. What remains is clean and direct.

Ordinary moments offer gentle clarity, and so these modest pauses serve as minute calibrations.

How about that? Momentary doorways to meaning baked right into our daily tasks. Psychologist‑poet Steve Taylor notes that presence prefers modest settings: a kettle boiling, emptying the dish rack, a face being washed, a toothbrush vibrating in a half‑lit mirror.¹

Consciousness—call it awareness, being, or the field of experience—receives everything. It’s the spacious medium in which every sensation, memory, and intention appears, gently rising and falling. When the mind’s swirl subsides like our Sonicare timing out, that background shows itself: open, quiet, already complete.

When we brush, wash our face, or sip our coffee, during these morning and evening routines we can notice ourselves as this aware presence stepping forward into being itself instead of leaning back as some separate, detached observer. Rather than getting lost in toothpaste and to-do lists, we can gently rest in the spacious awareness that holds them, engaged yet unattached. Philosopher and nondual teacher Rupert Spira reminds us we can never fully step outside this “aware field” because everything we meet lives within it.²

Depth psychology chimes in with Carl Jung, who mapped the psyche’s hidden architecture about a century ago, calls the recovery of such moments a step toward our task of tasks: the slow uncovering of the myth quietly shaping a life.³

Jungian analyst James Hollis encourages us to treat small rituals as portals, asking, “What story is being served here?” ⁴ Moments of introspection that help us connect with the stories shaping our lives: what’s ours? what’s conditioned? what’s borrowed? what matters? what’s cleansing? what to spit out and rinse down the drain?

When awareness settles, the usual border between “inner” and “outer” worlds blurs. The buzzing handle, the cool bathroom tiles, the fleeting plan for breakfast all float inside the same clear space. Whether we imagine brushing in glory or in the grip of worry, each image rises in consciousness and dissolves back into it.

From this angle our twice‑daily habit becomes alignment practice.

Morning: What matters today? How will I show up for myself and for others?

Evening: Did I live that way? What residue am I willing to rinse before sleep?

We can transform the mundane into tiny bits of meaning. Awareness at the enamel cleanse helps us notice the aliveness in us, offering a moment to relax into the power of life.

We plug into our innate aliveness, right now, standing in front of the mirror, toothbrush vibrating in hand, not deferring awareness to more perfect moments. After all, as Oliver Burkeman reminds us, we may only meet this ritual a few thousand more times—six, perhaps, if we’re young—so why not use each visit to show up?⁵

Such quiet check‑ins keep the direction true without drama or fanfare. A moment with our inner sanctuary, and better breath.

We needn’t abandon goals or productivity. We simply stop outsourcing fulfilment to the next purchase, the next scroll, the next appraisal. Each pass of nylon over enamel streaks: meaning shines a little brighter, beneath every thought that tries to hide it.

Rinse. Spit. Smile at the minty tingle of dripping foam inching across your chin. In these tiny acts we return to ourselves: simple, fresh, and alive. We just need to tend to our Sonicare-type rituals and remember to charge the brush for tomorrow.

Routine and boredom beckon, how do you respond?

¹ Steve Taylor, The Adventure: Living Fully and Freely in an Uncertain World (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2023).

² Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware (Oxford: Sahaja Publications; New Harbinger Publications, Oakland, CA, 2017), 45–57; Rupert Spira, "Love is a Place," Non-Duality Blog, accessed June 10, 2025, https://rupertspira.com/non-duality/blog/philosophy/love_is_a_place.

³ Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), xxv.

⁴ James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2018).

⁵ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).

Lifelook: To live is to move as the field of change—felt, followed, and attended with care.

Subscribe now