It happens that sometimes I experience reality as independent of my wishes. They were not so reliable anyway. All these outcomes seem to me governed by chance and conditions, not by unknown hidden laws and plans. Or maybe I don’t see anything that needs to be really figured out before acting.
After all, I could perhaps notice that my mind seems to be working in abstractions, when all is really rooted in the body. And my concepts (including these lines) read as nothing but coarse models: they seem to work often, which is exactly why they can be wrong as well.
Anyway… I still experience myself as a real enough, constantly changing part of this causality. But not really as an author standing above it. Action happens through me (my circumstances, what’s actually in my reach) and not actually by some conductor who is constantly reasoning and deciding in every fraction of a second. Maybe I am just too lazy for that.
Excellence in result appears to be valuable. And sure, I’ve observed that its distribution is uneven and unfair. Where I sit is more a fact about circumstances than a proof of guilt or credit.
I began to enjoy treating intention more as a direction without a guaranteed outcome. I am fearful regarding claims. The trace, I find, begins with the claim, not the aim. What I take to be the trace an action leaves is maybe just the comparison between what I expected and what I got. Pride and regret once it’s finished, hope and fear while it’s still open. It always exhausts, so maybe it has been exhausted naturally already.
I often see any measurable success as a dangerous direction. It hides the false credit and lures me into the illusion that my imagination always reliably steers reality. As far as I can tell, it does not unless on a very small scale.
But from my observation, when I am holding on to my confusion and fixating on a definition, ownership leads plainly to claiming credit. My ideas clear as explanations wane. The less of me that’s defending, the simpler the account. That’s not easy either.
It seems not to be beyond, just one layer removed: my habit of weaving passing moments into a persistent list of accomplishments. With this layer off, I notice nothing happens when everything happens.
When watching the whole scene without seizing anything, I am careful not to get lost in my tendency toward eager, continuous monitoring, and also not steering. What I’ve noticed is that situations naturally offer a few, brief, fleeting openings for influence.
Well, my attempts at deliberate control were expensive, and deliberation was only rarely both helpful and executable. So maybe I should put it ahead of time and allow rehearsing while slowly intention becomes habit in every one of the many openings. But continuous supervision just made me feel like a constant failure.
Perhaps I can notice more how I experience things directly before all my concepts capture them. I could describe it from inside the moment, still subject to correction. My senses fail in defining it, but the process itself is real enough for me. I can’t account for its absence: past factors can’t be fetched in detail, and no vantage could fetch them without recreating the very habit I’m watching. That’s a limit I recognize.
It appears to be settling when everything looks to me like a reversal of expectation. The churn was my baseline all along, and what’s left has thinned out again and again. I heard others calling it stability. But a flow is not a fixed core.
Maybe everyone knows an experience similar to mine, when both my purposeful action and openness to outcomes do more than just coexist. Without openness, my action inscribes a record; with it, I watch it arise and cease, until nothing remains.
You are always welcome.
