The Way
to Wake Up.

01 / Our place in the larger picture

Where are we?

It’s strange how easily I forget where any of this is happening.

I’m on a planet, in a universe that existed long before anyone could worry about what to do with their life. There are distances I can read about without really being able to imagine them. Entire histories happening beyond anything I will ever see.

Then there’s me, trying to make the right decision.

I find something freeing in that proportion. My problem can be real and still be small. It can deserve care without becoming the measure of my entire existence. Sometimes I need to remember that the world contains more than whatever my attention has narrowed around.

But looking outward also does something else. The further I follow the story of what I’m made of, the less separate I seem.

The matter in my body has a history. Many of its elements were made in stars. The air, the water, the food, everything that keeps this body going comes from outside the boundary I call me. I’m part of the thing I’m looking at.

I like the image of a whirlpool in a river. Water keeps moving through it, and for a while a shape holds. Alan Watts gives me a way to think about myself like that: a pattern, temporarily here, inseparable from what moves through it.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s interbeing takes that same intuition somewhere more intimate. Look at anything closely enough and you find the conditions that made it possible. Follow my own life backward and there are people, places, things I never chose and things I will never know.

02 / The experience of being someone

What are we?

I experience my life from inside a mind that feels very convincing.

A thought appears, and suddenly I’m arguing with it. A feeling arrives, and the world seems to confirm it. I can spend hours inside a story before noticing that I’m telling one.

Learning about the mind has made me less certain that my immediate experience is the whole explanation.

I’m a biological being. I carry drives I didn’t invent, in a body with needs that don’t disappear because I would prefer to be rational. Hunger, fear, attachment, the need to belong. It helps me to think about evolution here. I stop expecting every impulse to have my happiness as its objective.

And somewhere in all of this, there is the experience of being me. A felt center, looking out at everything else. I find that strange. The universe contains beings that can experience it, and I’m one of them, trying to understand what that even means.

When I pay attention, thoughts appear before I’ve decided what to think. Which makes me wonder about the person I imagine behind them, directing everything. What am I actually authoring?

This is what draws me to the question of free will. How much could I have been otherwise? And if I’m inseparable from the conditions that produced me, what does that change about how I see myself and everyone else?

I’m drawn to Harris and Sapolsky here. Following the causes backward makes the idea of a completely independent author harder for me to hold. I know that argument isn’t settled. What has mattered personally is how it changes blame. There is less room for treating myself, or another person, as if we appeared from nowhere and simply decided to be this way.

There are still consequences. There are things to repair and boundaries to keep. But a thought doesn’t have to become a definition of who I am, and a person doesn’t have to be reduced to one thing they did.

03 / Other lives, seen from the inside

Who are we here with?

Other people have an entire experience happening inside them too.

I know this, obviously. And still, I can move through the world as if other people are mainly characters in whatever is happening to me. What they think of me. What they gave me. What they failed to give me.

Remembering that part of it was never about me has brought relief. Another person has their own history, their own fear, things they can articulate and things they can’t. I can be affected by them without being the explanation for them.

I find connection in trying to understand how someone arrived at a view different from mine. We’re both here, human and limited, trying to make sense of something from the inside.

And the company extends beyond humans.

Reading about other minds makes our way of being feel less like the obvious standard for everything. An octopus is living something I can barely imagine. My own experience gives me a very small window into what experience could be.

I’m drawn to the ethical idea that the capacity to feel matters more than being clever. A being doesn’t need to impress me to deserve consideration. Suffering doesn’t become less consequential because it happens in a form unfamiliar to me.

This changes what I do with the thought that we aren’t special. I feel less need to rank us above everything, and more curiosity about what we’re part of.

It changes how I think about differences among people too. Different minds, needs, limits. I want room for those differences, including the ones that need support.

04 / Living with an open question

Why are we here?

This is where I run out of certainty.

I can learn about how things developed, how life evolved, how a mind works. The question of an ultimate purpose remains.

I don’t have an answer I can establish. I have interpretations I’m drawn to, experiences that have changed me, things that seem true when I’m living them and become harder to hold onto afterward.

I’m learning to let that be an honest position.

The Zen perspective I keep returning to makes room for existence without requiring a final explanation. It just is. There is something here to experience before I know what to conclude about it.

That can be frustrating for a mind that wants coherence. Mine would very much like to understand the whole thing and then proceed accordingly.

But I’m suspicious of the point where I take an interpretation and stop questioning it because having an answer feels better. I want a way to live that leaves room to discover I was wrong.

For now, I can choose what I live by and pay attention to what happens. Does it help me see more clearly? Does it make me more available to life and to other people? What does it ask of me in practice?

Not knowing an ultimate why doesn’t make life meaningless to me. Meaning is something I encounter through being involved. Making something. Understanding something. Loving someone. Using what I can do to contribute to a world I share.

Thinking matters to me. It’s part of how I participate. But I can also think about meaning for so long that I’m no longer doing anything through which I might find it.

05 / What we do with the time we have

How do we live?

This is the question the others keep changing.

I have limited time, limited energy, an incomplete understanding of myself and the world. I will never get to everything. Oliver Burkeman helped me take that limit more seriously. There isn’t a version of my life in which I make enough correct decisions to avoid having to choose.

Some possibilities will remain possibilities. What I actually spend my time doing becomes my life.

I once wrote that if life is the sum of our Wednesdays, I was afraid I would look back and see myself standing still, full of ideas, making excuses for not going to live them.

That still gets me.

I want to create things. Learn. Be outside. Have conversations where I really see someone and let them see me. Use my abilities to make something better. Feel my life with my body too, rather than experiencing everything from inside my head.

I also want to be able to recognize when something is already enough.

Meditation keeps saying some version of: it’s okay, just live. My response was that before, my life actually wasn’t okay. There were things that needed changing. I don’t want to lose that distinction.

Sometimes I need to act. Sometimes I need help. Sometimes I need to notice that I’m still searching for a problem to solve when there is already a life here I wanted.

I’m trying to become more able to tell.

And kindness keeps surviving the whole inquiry.

Whatever I believe about the universe, other beings can be hurt. I can make someone’s day harder or easier. I can listen, create, help, repair. My reach has limits, but within those limits there are real lives.