Come Back to Your Senses. More Often Than Never.

A simple practice for experiencing more of the life you're already living.

Watching my grandchildren play reminds me of when I was a kid, not just the stories I remember but the rich sensory details that live in my memory without coalescing into clear storylines. Quinn gets excited by spotting a purple crayon in the batch. Frankie gets nervous when the sky darkens, or he hears thunder rumbling in the distance. Both of them giggle uncontrollably when they hide from a parent returning home from work, even though neither can resist gleefully announcing they’re hiding.

When we’re at the swimming pool, I find myself listening to the blend of squeals and splashes that evoke countless similar sensory experiences, coming alive in my imagination even without conjuring any associated beginnings, middles, or endings.

A lot of our time gets spent on making sense of what’s happening, and for good reason—it’s how we solve problems, understand one another, and find our way through a complicated world. Yet when interpretation takes over, we can drift away from the raw experience of living.

There’s another way to be here. Rather than letting the impulse to explain and solve everything dominate, we can discover how deeply satisfying it is to meet what’s happening directly through our senses.

Pause to notice real-time sensory details.

Let’s break it down.

Pause

Try, now and then, to briefly set aside the urge to make sense—not because it’s bad, but because perception has something to teach us that interpretation can’t.

You don’t have to stop what you’re doing. Just shift into a slightly more observant stance toward whatever is already happening.

Notice

In the midst of whatever is happening in the present, most of us tend to ask immediately: "What does this mean?"

For a few seconds, play with a different question: ”What is actually here?”

You're temporarily shifting from making sense to sensing directly.

This kind of noticing takes practice because it requires setting aside, even briefly, the compelling drama playing out in your mind so you can observe real life unfolding in and around you.

This shift is somehow both unbelievably simple and surprisingly difficult. What makes it difficult is remembering to do it—and then not overthinking it. The simplicity comes from how natural it is to reconnect through our senses.

It’s a way of coming back to your senses—in the most literal sense of the phrase.

Real-time sensory details

When you pause to notice what’s happening in any moment, what comes into the foreground is what you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell:

• The taste of the coffee you’re sipping.

• The warmth of the mug in your hands.

• The touch of a breeze on your skin.

• The play of sunlight on the wall.

• The sounds of people in other rooms—talking, laughing, or arguing.

• The hum of the air conditioner.

• The feeling of your body registering boredom or frustration during a meeting.

Your senses are doorways inviting you to briefly set aside the need to make sense of what’s on your mind.

The pull toward interpretation and internal commentary is strong. Instead of waiting for it to quiet down, you can practice letting the sensory details fascinate you. This is a trainable skill, and it doesn’t require perfect conditions to cultivate.

When you approach moments this way—pausing, noticing, and letting real-time sensory details come to the foreground—you’re not doing a fancy new technique. You’re reclaiming a built-in capacity you’ve always had. And as simple as it seems, this small shift in how you pay attention can quietly change your relationship with everyday life.

Why this shift matters

This habit isn’t just about collecting interesting details.

Pausing to notice real-time sensory details strengthens your natural capacity to make direct contact with being alive as experience unfolds.

This layer of experience is always available—hiding in plain sight—waiting for you to notice. Yet we tend to postpone this kind of contact by default, assuming some ideal future moment will be more worthy of our attention.

Children notice these details without being told they’re important. Adults forget, and have to reprioritize them intentionally—even though we have plenty of evidence that they matter.

The good news is that this tiny, capacity-building shift becomes easier through repetition.

There are two ways I think about strengthening attention:

• Through longer, dedicated practice.

• Through hundreds of brief repetitions woven into ordinary life.

You don’t have to choose one or the other. They reinforce each other, much like structured exercise and simply moving more throughout the day.

Some people thrive with a daily meditation practice. Others rarely sit formally but become remarkably consistent about noticing throughout the day. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

You don’t have to find the perfect blend to benefit. Any way you practice this shift—longer sessions, tiny moments, or a mix of both—can help you come back to your senses more often than never.

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Exercise

This exercise explores sights, sounds, and bodily sensations to strengthen your capacity to pause, notice real-time sensory details, and feel more alive.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• While waiting.

• While moving from one activity to another.

• When you feel like your own mind is yanking you around.

Click above to listen to the attention exercise.

Settle into practice. When we shift into formal practice, we don’t need to wait for ideal surroundings, turn thinking off, or numb any emotional residue percolating from the preceding hours. We need to gently steer our attention away from making sense and toward making contact with what’s happening in and around us.

Notice visual details. Pay special attention to sights around you. How might an artist, a young child, or an animal investigate their experience of seeing? If you were forced to wear bandages on your eyes for several days following a medical procedure, how would you take in the scene? Try to emulate these types of curiosity.

If your eyes are open, pick a specific object to look at for a few seconds. Notice its shape, color, and texture without rushing to evaluate it as a whole. You can broaden your gaze to take in some part of what’s in front of you, or take in your entire field of vision, again emphasizing color, form, and the quality of the light rather than trying to describe what you see or make a list of tasks related to it.

If your eyes are closed, gaze into the darkness, or at the swirling mixture of light and dark you discover there. Even with your eyes closed

In this moment, seeing is like this.

Notice auditory details. Pay special attention to sounds around you. Let your attention be pulled to specific sounds—nearby, farther away, or off in the distance. Listen in one direction and then the opposite—right and left, in front and behind, above and below. Listen for fleeting sounds and the silence that occupies the space when they’re gone.

If you notice your attention being pulled into verbal thinking, instead of trying to get rid of it, try to listen to it as just another sound in nature. Try to focus on its volume, rhythm, and tone rather than on what it means. The meaning will be obvious, of course, but try to let it be secondary to what you’re curious about.

In this moment, hearing is like this.

Notice body sensations. Pay attention to whatever you can feel in your body. Notice what feels purely physical, obviously emotional, or some inextricable blend of both. Explore sensations that are comfortable, uncomfortable, stable, and changing.

While your visual and auditory senses expand your awareness of the space around you, they remind you how little physical space you actually occupy in any situation—even though that space feels so personal and important.

In this moment, feeling is like this.

Focus on one external sensory category at a time. Pick one or two sensory domains to explore—or focus on all three—one sensory detail at a time. Practice in a way that feels like strengthening a shift you could make out in the world as you go about your business.

Life practice. Come back to your senses—more often than never—by making contact with sights, sounds, and body sensations throughout the day. While this might seem trivial or too easy to make a real impact, I encourage you (I dare you) to stay open to the possibility that habitually paying closer attention to the mundane details of being alive can bring ordinary moments to life.

From my 2015 TEDxColumbus talk, “Don’t Try to Be Mindful”

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