Starting Nowhere

I sit down to write this morning and nothing comes. I try going in a couple different directions, but all the paths peter out. So how to enter into life from nowhere? For this is the point of my writing—to try to find some way to touch the aliveness of the moment—to enter into and appreciate the particular form in which life is appearing now—and in doing so to invite you, the reader, to do the same. I’m always trying to demonstrate and practice that which I’m trying to say.

While wise and true words may flow easily onto the page, they are indeed hard to live. Of course, this moment of no inspiration is equally part of life as every other moment. But some moments we would rather just pass over. ‘I’ll wait for this to pass so that I can live my real life.’ But we only ever live at this moment and it seems we might as well try to make the best of wherever we are—though going numb or avoiding or fixing are always options.

I suppose a reasonable person would just not write when nothing comes to write about. But I continue to refuse to be a reasonable person.

Which reminds me of the new wonderful book I’m reading at my daughter’s suggestion: How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. (And so a gust of wind fills my sails and the boat which was dead in the water begins to creep forward.) Barrett is a down-to-earth writer who reports on contemporary research (including hers) showing that emotions are not ‘things’ that are triggered, but ephemeral events arising from the ongoing and complex substrate of neural activity that we call life.

The model of the triune brain with the thinking section (neocortex) sitting safely on top of the feeling (limbic) section and presiding over the survival (reptilian) base, though reassuring, is not accurate. Feeling is involved in everything we think, say and do—and usually this engagement happens beneath the level of our awareness. So we are free to imagine that we are perfectly reasonable people making perfectly reasonable decisions based on the facts of the world we encounter.

But, it turns out, we human beings are not reasonable creatures. (Given the last four years, this should not be news to any of us.) Current brain research aligns with the teachings of the Buddha 2,600 years ago—that we are constantly experiencing some ‘feeling tone’ of like dislike or neutral (2^nd foundation of mindfulness) and that ‘reality’ is a participatory phenomena. Barrett puts it this way:

“you might think about your environment as existing in the outside world, separate from yourself, but that’s a myth. You (and other creatures) do not simply find yourself in an environment and either adapt or die. You construct your environment—your reality—by virtue of what sensory input from the physical environment your brain selects…”

She reports that it’s not just the selection of sensory input, but how we make meaning of the input that constructs the world we experience as ‘out there.’ It turns out that our sense perception involves much more input from what we remember and know from the past than what we are receiving from the outside at any moment. So our brains construct the world and then react to the world we construct as if it were real. In the actual brain, there is no inside or out, just the constant darkness within the skull that is illuminated by a constant wash of billions of neural circuits firing in an emerging web of dynamic complexity.

So, this morning, this constant wash of dynamic complexity first appeared as little energy and no inspiration. In claiming my intention (to participate and play in and with whatever is here) and refusing to be reasonable, space was created for something else to appear and be known.

This is what I believe in and want to stake my life on. Life is always happening here and that life is big enough to encompass everything: something and nothing, inspiration and dullness, excitement and discouragement. And the only way in is to hang around long enough, to pay enough attention, to be unreasonable enough to join in.