Originally published on Substack. Read and subscribe here. https://deferocontra258173.substack.com/p/the-hidden-richness-of-reality
Reality is astonishingly rich, but most of us perceive only a tiny fraction of it because our attention is consumed by human habits, goals, and worries.
Look closely
I snapped this photo at a restaurant in Vietnam. It shows some grilled fish surrounded by an assortment of fresh greens, with a little flower carved from a carrot sitting in the middle. At first, I simply saw a plate of food.
Then I looked more closely.
I picked up the orange star and examined it carefully. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how the cook had cut a carrot into that shape. It was a marvel!
Then I noticed the greens. I didn’t know the name of these greens, but they’re common in Vietnamese cuisine and they’re tasty. Look at the leaves.
Some have small, closely spaced saw-tooth edges. Others have larger teeth spaced farther apart. Some have a bulging cellular pattern on their surface. Others have a more sinuous, flowing design. Some have a dull finish. Others seem to shine.
None of this was important at all. Yet, once I started looking, there were plenty of fascinating patterns to see.
I put a few of the leaves in my mouth and started chewing slowly and mindfully.
Now: Taste. Texture. Moisture. Intensity.
Multiple sensations were happening at the same time. It was like a symphony in which many instruments produce layer upon layer of experience, all at once. In the best of worlds, the layers agree with each other, producing a pleasing effect—in this case, a pleasing taste.
This got me thinking.
How much of this would I normally have missed?
Probably most of it.
A moment is never just a moment
If you look closely at the things in your environment, you’ll see form and color, but also something else. Our ongoing experience seems to be carried by a mysterious thing we call time.
Tick by tick, each second of time is strangely the same. Yet within this sameness, the experience of each second is completely unique—absolutely unique in every detail. Our multi-layered experience arises with freshness when viewed with care.
A second contains:
- a multitude of sounds
- tiny shifts of light
- bodily sensations
- thoughts appearing from nowhere
- smells
- memories
- unexpected events
Every second resembles the previous one, yet no second is truly repeatable.
There’s a lot going on. And most of it passes unnoticed.
Where does our attention go?
By habit, our attention tends to latch onto particular items and grant them meaning. The cushion on my chair feels too hard. Grrrr. Why didn’t I buy a better one the other day when I had a chance at the store? My stomach feels too full from lunch. Next time I’ll eat more salad and less pasta. And on and on it goes.
The richness of the moment contains these things, too. That’s part of the tapestry of human existence. It’s just that we wallow in our thoughts, especially when they are laced with emotion. We identify with our thoughts and sometimes struggle with a voice inside that seems to be cranking out such thoughts whether we want it to or not.
But all of this, too, is marvelous material to be noticed.
Sure, these human things may not be as sublime as a flower. But they can be just as fascinating (and entertaining) when viewed through the proverbial beginner’s mind. My thought about the uncomfortable chair is an event. The sensation of my full stomach is an event. The little voice in my head that complains about both is an event.
So is the moment when we realize we’ve been lost in thought for the past five minutes. That’s an event too.
Somehow, it’s all simply happening.
The universe doesn’t hold back
What if each and every detail of experience arrives free of charge in ways that seem predictable most of the time, yet can also seem random and even miraculous?
In this context, I love the following phrase, thanks to a dear friend:
The universe doesn’t hold back.
Make no mistake. I’m not necessarily making a grand metaphysical claim here. I’m playing with ideas. Stay with me.
There’s plenty. There is an abundance of experience available to us when we’re able to turn the dial and look with fresh eyes.
The greens on that plate? They weren’t hiding anything from me. The leaves weren’t suddenly becoming more intricate because I looked at them. They were already that way.
I simply wasn’t noticing.
And that distinction seems important.
Our mind has a good reason for filtering reality
Our conscious mind is limited. We only have so much capacity to observe experience from moment to moment. It’s meant to be that way.
The prodigious ocean of data in our environment would swamp us in an instant if it weren’t for a well-designed system of mental filters that restricts the input.
I’m not suggesting that we should turn all the filters off and open the flood gate. That would be ridiculous and probably debilitating.
Instead, perhaps it’s best to open our senses gradually and look for the subtle things.
Attention is powerful. It’s active, not passive. We can choose, at least to some degree, what we notice.
Two remarkable abilities
The mind has two extraordinary abilities. It can imagine what isn’t here, and it can appreciate—or overlook—what is.
We spend a remarkable amount of time using the first ability. Imagine being a different person, in a different state of health, in a different socioeconomic bracket, or even being a different creature altogether.
What would it be like to gaze out through the eyes of my darling cat or the sparrow outside? What would it be like to be rich? What would it be like to have more inspiring parents?
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Acts of imagination are definitely creative. They allow us to explore possibilities, solve problems and create things that didn’t exist before.
But imagination isn’t receptive. We’re inserting something that wasn’t there before.
There is another possibility.
We can turn our attention toward what IS here. We can gaze upon current reality with a soft yet alert focus and discover its richness right now.
The carrot flower was already there. The interesting patterns on the leaves were already there. The sensations of chewing were already there in a sense. The sounds around me were already there.
I didn’t create any of them.
I received them.
Perhaps that’s an underappreciated form of creativity—not creating something new, but becoming receptive to something that was already present.
What if?
What if reality has been offering this richness all along? What if the limitation isn’t the universe—but the quality of our attention?
I can’t prove this.
You must look for yourself.
Tomorrow, spend five minutes observing a familiar place as though you’ve never seen it before. Don’t try to become enlightened. Just notice.
Look at the shapes. Listen. Notice the temperature of the air against your skin. Notice what your body is doing. Notice the thoughts that appear. Notice the things you normally ignore.
See how many details arrive that were not visible to you yesterday.
You may discover that the world hasn’t changed at all. But your experience of it has.
And I think if you do this, you just might feel a little more satisfied with your existence in this weird and wonderful thing called Life.
