Go with the Observable Flow
Allow the ordinary movement you can feel, hear, and see to help you unwind your internal grip.
This is the third installment of a four-part series on noticing impermanence in real time.
Go with the Observable Flow
Cultivating mindful awareness requires forgoing narrative constraints to cultivate a direct, intimate relationship with being alive. When we connect with the important people in our lives, we share details about conflict, difficult people, and yearning for unpleasant circumstances to change—the basic elements of drama and narrative. But practicing mindfulness doesn’t require villains, though we instinctively go looking for them. The usual suspects are our minds, our emotions, or any unpleasant sensation.
I opened this month’s Mindful Monday for Kent State University by inviting participants to share sensory experiences since last month’s session. The word cloud bloomed with sensory details: cobalt-blue skies, morning coffee sipped outside, birds chirping, gentle breezes, and brisk winds. This spontaneous report consisted of raw sensory data, so it read more like poetry. In this context, even itches, aches, and sadness are framed as perceptions to be witnessed rather than as problems to be solved.
One person shared “observing without controlling,” which describes the underlying stance of mindfully experiencing the present as it unfolds. With a bit of practice—less than most people assume—observing without controlling leads to the detection of a fundamental theme that’s a hallmark of all contemplative traditions and practices: impermanence.
The priestly classes within our wisdom traditions have inflated this theme into a philosophical, mystical perspective reserved for a chosen few, but the part of me shaped by Baptist roots rejects that, and my experience of Vipassana meditation tells me it’s available to anyone willing to test their own senses. Habitually paying closer attention to ordinary sensations turns out to be a kind of baptism that can transform your awareness of ordinary phenomena into a phenomenal awareness.
Impermanence operates at every imaginable scale. It stretches from grand geological ages and historical epochs down to the personal rhythms of life stages, seasons, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes. Each level reveals something about the nature of time and awareness. But when we zoom in to the handful of seconds unfolding right now, we develop a rare intimacy with impermanence—one that forms the root of all other scales.
This matters because in looking, listening, and feeling for observable change, we meet parts of ourselves we tend to overlook. There’s a deeply ingrained habit of interfering with whatever is happening, regardless of whether we can actually influence it. Again and again, we confront the urge to micromanage our experience—to fix, tweak, or escape what we notice. In doing so, we often stifle both the discomforts we wish to avoid and the pleasures we hope to preserve.
With practice, you start to spot the gap between what’s happening and what you wish were happening. Children meet the world with fluidity and presence, but adulthood brings a subtle friction—a constant sense that moments should be different from what they are.
To be clear, even after years of directly noticing this dynamic, I’m far from immune to the undertow of its power. While I don’t expect to ever fully outgrow it, I’m committed to spending a little time each day developing attentional skills that gradually erode it. When the friction does ease, life feels more vibrant and alive in ways I couldn’t have predicted before living it for myself. Those moments are hard to put into words, but they’re unmistakable when they arrive.
Once, walking beside a creek, I devoted a significant amount of time to really listening to the raw sensory details—to the splash of water, the sound of my footsteps, and the subtle emotional reactions in my boy. As my focus deepened and I let go of internal interference, the ordinary sounds became astonishingly musical, and my body responded with vivid feelings too nuanced for words. I was so absorbed that the internal micromanager fell asleep, replaced by a visceral awareness of the ancient, universal urge to make music. I realized that I shared the same basic physiology as anyone who ever tried to evoke emotion through music. We all do. We are capable of being comforted and moved, and we want to pass this one. Long before language, mothers hummed lullabies to restless infants; tribes marked sacred moments with rhythm. From ancient times to Beethoven to Sondheim, the musicality in the rushing water and birdsong connected me to every human urge to make music.
Another time, I spent 48 hours alone during a much longer silent canoeing and camping meditation trip in Utah (which was even less fun than it might sound, but also sprinkled with profound moments). I went into those two solo retreat days expecting undisturbed practice surrounded by vast red canyon walls and sleeping under the stars. What I got was a tidal wave of grief the moment I sat down to meditate. My daughter had recently driven off in a U-Haul to start grad school in Chicago, after years of living close by, even throughout college at Ohio State. Raising her has been the most fulfilling experience of my life. I wasn’t ready for this chapter to end, or to admit it already had. Who am I when I’m not caring for someone, when the job quietly transfers into their hands?
Unwillingly, I found myself practicing what can only be called sobbing meditation. It was excruciating—my body, mind, and heart all led with resistance. If it were up to me, I would never have chosen to face this emotional pain at that time. I would have distracted myself or comforted myself with denial. I didn’t want an empty nest or the grief of her successful individuation. I wanted to control the narrative, but what I got was catharsis—the kind of healing that stings while it soothes. That wave of relief made me understand, in my bones, why we make myths and hymns, why we reach for rituals to honor the sacred, fleeting, unrepeatable moments of joy and sorrow life weaves together.
Instead of trying to quiet my mind during those two days, though, I allowed it to play with words and images in whatever way it wanted, and tried to fold them into the flow of what I was trying not to impede. I walked out of the canyon with this poem:
Instincts
by Daron Larson
There is great comfort
in losing a child
to her own adult life,
naturally,
and yet —
a little girl is still gone
leaving me to tend
this yearning to nurture
a fragile beginning
toward its gradual
sudden blooming.
Experiences like these remind me that when we scale down to ride the sensory ripples of the present, we tap into the emotional and artistic impulses that live in all of us. It doesn’t matter if it comes out as laughter, tears, singing, dancing, gardening, or making dinner.
Actually allowing myself to feel what’s happening, instead of narrating or fixing it, is both harder and more necessary than I ever imagined. Giving up the illusion of control brings a jolt of vitality—not always pleasant, but always vivid. It’s the same aliveness that fuels our best art, our worst heartbreaks, our laughter, our poetry, our tragedies, and even that one perfect haiku where impermanence glimmers between the lines.
Our distracted, numbed-out, algorithm-driven culture discourages the urge to turn feelings into art—art that doesn’t need an audience. Authentic self-expression now competes with personal branding, reality TV, and the transformation of daily life into advertising.
So, instead of trying to fix the world, start to free yourself in small ways when you can. Give yourself a daily pocket of time—no one can do this for you—where you witness the ordinary, the overlooked, the mundane details that accumulate and make you feel alive. These are the same sparks that have fueled human creativity since the beginning of humanity.
You don’t need to rocket around the moon to taste the universe’s vastness. It’s right here, woven into every ordinary moment, waiting for you to notice.
Practice scaling down: notice the subtle changes unfolding within a handful of seconds. Let them take you where you need to go—break your heart open, stitch it together again, and help you spot the humanity shining behind every face you meet.
Exercise
This exercise helps you tune in to the subtle shifts in your body and the world around you—those small changes in sensation, sight, and sound that are easy to miss but rich with aliveness.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Junior high music recitals
Movie theaters
Weekend mornings
