Day 21

I’ve been thinking about how strange it is that when someone leaves our immediate environment, they no longer exist to our senses. They’re only in our minds.

There’s of course a case that everything only exists in our mind because that’s where our senses are processed and interpreted, so what we call the external world is entirely experienced within consciousness, but maybe that’s for another post.

For now, let’s assume there is a world around us, like we tend to do.

When people leave our immediate environment, they’re no longer being perceived directly through our senses, so they become a memory. An idea.

Even if they text or call us, what are we actually experiencing? A screen. A sound. A message coming through a device. In terms of what’s happening in our direct environment—what we can actually see, hear, and touch—they're not here. We’re not with them. We’re with the idea of them.

This used to be a crisis for us, as babies. Before we developed object permanence, when a caregiver left the room, it was like they vanished. As far as we could tell, they were gone. It wasn’t until somewhere between 4 and 12 months old that our brains began to grasp that things—and people—continue to exist even when we can't perceive them. That developmental milestone changed everything. We could begin to trust in what we couldn’t see.

And this trust was based on experience, which showed us that people leave our perception and come back into it again.

But what if we return to that question, not from a place of regression, but of curiosity?

Let’s open this up a bit. When we read about or hear about or watch something that happened elsewhere—on the news, online, on social media—what is the actual evidence that it occurred? I don’t mean this in a conspiratorial way. I mean it in a phenomenological way.

What are we actually experiencing in that moment?

A headline. A video. A person telling us a story. We are not there. We are not sensing it. We are being told about it.

In our daily lives, so much of what we believe to be true is based not on what is happening around us, but on what we’ve been informed of, or what we remember, or what we expect (which is based on what we remember). So we walk around not so much in the present moment, but in a mental collage of stories, assumptions, and inherited realities.

And when someone leaves your environment, how do you know they still exist? I’m not saying they don’t. I’m just asking what the evidence is. Our thoughts? Our memories? A belief that there is an entire world that exists beyond our perception?

Imagine, just for a moment, what life would be like if you only concerned yourself with what is happening right here, right now. If the only things you were aware of were the things you could directly experience.

What would life be like?

I’m not saying that would be better or worse. This is not a self-help piece or an advocation for such a way of life. It’s simply a curiosity. A question.

And perhaps, at times, an invitation.

An invitation that you can accept sparingly on a quiet morning, a midday coffee, or a moment before bed.

An invitation to be only with what is right here, right now.

An invitation to let everything else go.