Little By Little, Then All At Once

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• a quiet morning

• sitting on a park bench

• getting ready for bed

• before getting out of bed

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When I was eating breakfast one quiet morning, the sun slowly crept up the window until it was shining almost directly into my eyes. It occurred to me that while it felt like the sun was moving, it was really me, the table, the room, the house, and the whole earth that were all rotating imperceptibly.

Nearly four hundred years have passed since Galileo defended the heliocentric theory,¹ yet we still perceive ourselves as the center of the universe.

We still go to the beach to watch the sun rise and set. It's still challenging to imagine that people living in other time zones are currently sleeping while we are going about our business awake. The image of an enormous sphere of water, dirt, plants, animals, and buildings careening through space remains unsettling.

Our nervous systems crave certainty and solidity, and, in their absence, have created a complex process for representing stability. If the sun isn’t actually menacing me or entertaining me, and the ground beneath my feet isn’t stationary, where am I supposed to find a safe place to make my home?

It's very useful to accept these illusions, but at some point, we can’t help but see through them. We navigate the uncertainty by trying to determine what the absence of actual solidity means. Some interpret it as nihilism,² others find that there being no unchanging thing simply means that every thing is in constant dynamic flux.³

Mindfulness meditation practice provides an effective way to gradually diminish our need for stability and predictability. By letting go of the desire to control everything to feel secure, we can learn to live more comfortably with life's uncertainties.

This shift allows us to appreciate the wonder of actively engaging in the continuous flow of the universe.

Three Part Lead Bodycase Works, by Antony Gormley

Exercise

You can explore this perspective viscerally, rather than conceptually, by becoming an observer of all available body sensations, rather than thinking about or trying to change them.