A Slap in the Face

There is a small movement that happens all the time.

This is not quite enough.

The room is not quite right. The body is not quite right. The mood is not quite right. The day is not quite right.

Something else is needed. More clarity. More ease. More silence. More confirmation. More something.

It does not usually appear as complaint. It appears as ordinary sense.

Of course this is dull. Of course this is stuck. Of course this is not it.

The thought does not arrive as a thought. It arrives as the situation.

This is the trick of it.

We are not usually looking at what is actually here and then finding it insufficient.

We are accepting what thought says about it, and mistaking that for what is here.

The mood is given a name.

The body is given a name.

The afternoon is quietly explained away.

The whole thing is quietly settled before it has really been seen.

And once it is settled, why look?

If this is already known as boredom, stuckness, irritation, confusion, failure, or simply “not enough”, then the case is closed. There is nothing to discover. Only something to fix, escape, improve, transcend, or endure.

This happens in spiritual language too.

Perhaps especially there.

This is not clear enough. Not surrendered enough. Not present enough. Not awake enough. Not embodied enough. Not radiant enough.

The old rejection gets dressed in better clothes.

But the movement is the same.

This is dismissed on behalf of something imagined.

And the strange thing is that this dismissal often happens before we have really looked.

Not looked at the label. Not looked at the story. Not looked at the conclusion.

Actually looked at this.

This, before we have quite decided what it is.

The sound in the room, the light, the pressure in the body, the unease, the thought, the sense of wanting something else.

The whole ungraspable fact of it.

Not as material for analysis. Not as a spiritual exercise to produce a result.

Just this.

And when it is looked into more closely, it is not the thin thing thought says it is.

It is not dead.

It is not waiting for thought to make it meaningful.

There is a strange richness here. A fullness. A livingness. Even in what we call dullness. Even in confusion. Even in the contracted taste of wanting to be somewhere else.

This is not sentiment.

It is not saying everything is lovely.

It is not gratitude as a mood.

It is simply that the quick verdict does not reach what is here.

The verdict is too small.

This is the slap in the face.

Not something life has done to us.

Something we keep doing to what is here.

Again and again, this vivid presence is met with a quiet insult.

Not enough. Not yet. Not this.

And because the insult is familiar, it feels intelligent. It feels honest. It feels like a clear reading of the situation.

But often it is only an old belief speaking with confidence.

Thought says what this is, and we bow to it.

Meanwhile this remains here, strange and intimate and alive, not waiting for permission to be complete.

This is the sort of looking we are exploring on Patreon.

Not as another conclusion. Not as a better attitude.

More as a quiet return to what is already here.

If that draws you, you can join us there.