…I am having trouble talking to people lately, which is uncharacteristic. Maybe somebody asks me how my day is going, and I pause for a moment and struggle to answer, before I remember that I don’t have to answer comprehensively. So I say something like, “It’s going great.” In light of this, I’m starting to do what I did when I was a nervous teenager—prepare rote answers to basic social questions.

…Chunks of my identity are falling off, month by month. Parts of me that kept track of my social status and my anxieties are relaxing and falling into the void. What’s left, increasingly, is a feeling of complete satisfaction with the way things are. You know that feeling of drinking a glass of water that’s exactly correctly cool on a hot day? Imagine that feeling, on your soul, moment after moment.

It’s getting confusingly good in my brain. I am starting to understand why meditation teacher Shinzen Young said he’d rather have another day in his mind than 25 years in the mind of a wealthy, healthy celebrity sexual athlete…Now, I am completely happy about everyday substance—air, lemonade, kiss from wife, hug of floor by feet.

…There are side effects. It turns out that my anxiety was creating a lot of the sense of space and time. I often have the odd but pleasant sensation that the world before me is a brief splash of color between the void behind my eyes and the void behind the sky. Also, when you ask me how my day was, it’s hard to look back from the present moment, to conjure something other than what’s currently happening. It might take me a second to remember which Zoom calls I had, or what I said to whom. When I do recount the day’s events, they sound like plausible fiction coming out of my mouth—I am not at all convinced that the words deliver any substance.

It’s not that I can’t remember past events, or conjure linear time, it’s just not the way time intuitively presents itself to me these days. Every experience seems superimposed on the same timeless moment—it’s all a self-presenting flicker on the screen. Similarly, my actions don’t feel like a selection I made from menu of options, presented moment-by-moment—it feels more like I’m falling through space. I don’t feel like I’m making many choices.

This is the eeriest part. Previously, I would have expected a diminished sense of agency to make me act robotically, or sap my motivation. But now that I’m entering this territory myself, I find that I’m more engaged, sincere, and loving when I’m not getting in the way of the universe. I am quick with a compliment, or a dumb joke, or a poem dashed off to a friend during an idle moment of the workday. This is less of a surprise when I think of how, often, we are at our most creative and authentic in flow states, when we’re not attending to ourselves. We abandon ourselves and something else takes over, and yet this is when our finest qualities display themselves.

The difficult part is that as more of me surrenders into this, the parts of me that aren’t ready become incredibly obvious. Maybe 93% of the time I am in this unusually pleasant mode. But in the remaining 7%, I am encountering the building blocks of all the defenses that I once took for my personality. The childhood resentments, the basic sense of insufficiency that powers human beings, what is sometimes called the core wounding. It used to be hidden from me under my supposedly sophisticated behavior. It was visible to others, but now I can see it clear as day myself. Practice, now, is about going towards it, placing it right in the center, befriending it. And, when I don’t keep up my practice, those young desperate feelings, being now so conveniently close to the surface, quietly start running the show again. This is surprising, and it obliges me to keep going.

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