Coming back to presence

On being frazzled, Orwell, and the fascinating cry of wild geese

Welcome to this first installment of The Perpetual Beginner, in which I explore the practice of wakeful noticing. I would love to know what you think: please share comments or reflections below, where you’ll also find options to subscribe to the newsletter.

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The «beginnings» of this newsletter can be traced back exactly ten years, to a crisp autumnal morning in October 2013 when I passed through security at London Heathrow and waited in line to board a flight to Chicago…

Two hours later, back at my apartment, I set my backpack down on the kitchen table and contemplated what might have been. At the very last moment, I’d turned around. For all my efforts to steel myself, the prospect of the ten-day trip touring several cities in the mid-West was more than I could handle. The truth was that I was frazzled. Several times, in the week prior, my hands were shaking as I tried to type out work emails. While I’d powered through, deep down, I knew that I was burnt out.

Thus my planned vacation became an unplanned staycation, and in the days that followed, I spent a lot of time doing very little. That first evening, I went to my yoga class and the words my teacher must have been offering for months finally made sense: the need to let go of continually striving and instead accept things – starting with the state of my mind and body – as I found them.

Perhaps for the first time in my adult life, I appreciated the truth that life only ever happens in the present moment. I began to meditate, resting with the subtle sensations of the breath, the ambient sounds from outside, the unfolding of thoughts as they arose: just being with what’s there, not trying to change anything. Day to day, I made a practice of coming back to presence: unhooking from my inner monologue and opening up to what I could see and hear all around me. Becoming aware of the silent presence of each thing, and the space between things.

Slowing down in this way, it suddenly seemed as though everything deserved my full attention: the flicker of a candle; the rustling of leaves in the wind outside; the particular “look” of the window frame. Each took on a vibrancy, a fullness, that would have previously passed me by.

What struck me most of all, though, was the realisation that entire spiritual and philosophical traditions were grounded in this practice of wakeful noticing. As someone used to inhabiting a propositional world – the world of ideas, concepts and opinions – this shift to an experiential perspective marked a radical break.

Rather than being predominantly in my head, I learnt to tune into the wisdom of the body. Rather than choosing between this or that view about the state of the world, I learnt to honour the silence that holds all that is said. Rather than breaking things down in a bid to understand them – that is, to analyse – I learnt to lean into simply perceiving what’s there, which is always whole.

During that staycation, I rewatched A Beautiful Mind, in which Russell Crowe plays the mathematician and pioneer of game theory, John Nash. There’s a scene where Nash and his fellow students are gathered on one of lawns on the campus of Princeton University. But while his classmates are absorbed in conversation, Nash has withdrawn, seemingly transfixed by a cluster of pigeons. When asked what he’s doing, he replies, with the air of a mad professor: “I’m hoping to abstract an algorithm to define their movement”.

The pigeon scene from A Beautiful Mind

Alas, from my own education and my experience working in the social sciences, I knew this basic move all too well: pivoting away from what we actually see in front of us and reaching immediately for some theoretical framework that can explain what we’re seeing.

But what’s it like to let go of this urge to know how things are and how they fit into some grand theory? What’s it like to simply perceive the world around us, without an agenda – to be really open to what’s there?

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My hope, with this newsletter, is to explore what it means to come back to this experiential perspective, both in everyday life but also as a challenge to the dominant culture of discourse of our times.

That culture of discourse is one which privileges the abstract, even as this takes us away from what the texture of our everyday experiences are actually like. It’s one which construes humans either in cognitive terms (as in the expression, “a meeting of minds”) or as lumps of bio-physical matter, to be viewed from the outside (“scientific materialism”).

What’s more, this kind of cold, detached worldview is turbo-charged in the digital era because from the standpoint of Silicon Valley, everything boils down to data, human experiences being no exception. And so just as John Nash in the 1950s sought to “abstract an algorithm” to capture the movement of the pigeons, tech companies today seek to “abstract an algorithm” to mimic and predict our movements in all kinds of ways. This may bring benefits in the form of new technologies that expand the frontier of what’s possible. But one of the side-effects is that, in our tech-mediated culture, we, too, are encouraged to see the world in an ever more “algorithmic” way, our lives reduced to a series of problems to be solved via ever more apps, more gadgets and more data.

And so, amidst all of this, the stance of The Perpetual Beginner involves coming back, again and again, to our actual, lived experience – with all of the ambiguities and mysteries that this throws up.

Contemplative traditions, like Buddhism and Taoism, are one gateway into this kind of experiential perspective. One of the things I love most about these traditions is the way they recognise the inherent mystery of the world itself – and the ineffable “thisness” of whatever presences. Thus Santideva, the 8^th Century Indian philosopher, referred to “the endlessly fascinating cry of wild geese”, something which can only be appreciated through our direct, non-conceptual experience. Similarly, the Japanese Zen master, Dogen, instructed his followers to open their eyes and look around. “Miracles are nothing other than fetching water and carrying firewood”, he taught.

Artists and writers offer other gateways. In a 2021 essay for the New Statesman, Ian McEwan highlights the “luminous moments of perception” that novelists tend to fixate on when celebrating a particular work. He gives the example of the passage in George Orwell’s essay, A Hanging, in which Orwell recounts following closely behind a condemned man on his way to the gallows and observing how the prisoner, with only minutes to live, took care to step around a puddle.

What I hope these examples make clear is that an experiential perspective is not synonymous with “turning inwards” to some inner domain. Rather, to attend openly and curiously to our moment-to-moment experience as it unfolds precisely is to refresh the aliveness through which we make contact with the pulsing, breathing world around us.

The endlessly fascinating cry of wild geese; the side-stepping of a puddle; the fetching of water and firewood.

In the end, it is always the world itself that we attend to. The role of moments of stillness, beyond helping us to listen to ourselves better, is to help us to receive more of the world, and to receive it more fully.

This is my humble hope, then, for The Perpetual Beginner: to explore what it means to come back to the aliveness of our bodies, and our pulsating exchanges with other people and the more-than-human world, as the crucial context within which we can look to make sense of it all.

Until my next dispatch, then, I hope you enjoy some moments to just look around, free of the need to interpret what you see. I hope you enjoy this beautiful season. As the autumn leaves are falling around me, I’m reminded of this haiku from Matsuo Basho:

On a withered branch
A crow is sitting
This autumn eve

Until next time ~~