Awareness

I awake, busy myself, activating my mind like a car’s engine, stimulating every intricate part to produce energy to move a colossal body. 

With the mental engine ignited, I advance at top speed, completing tasks and ticking the individual items on an invisible “things to do” list.

Then I sit down, stopping the bodily car and quieting the mental engine. Every part of my brain slows down, and the inner restlessness of my being comes to a haunting rest.

Slowly but surely, the gift of awareness starts unwrapping and revealing its content. 

I hear

distinctive sounds of birds,

rumbling air condition units.

I see 

snail-like moving ants carrying home bits of leaves for food,

busybodied bees kissing nectar-filled flowers.

I smell

an aromatic culinary scent escaping from a neighbour’s kitchen,

mixed body odour absconding my body pores.

I feel

a gentle breeze, tenderly kissing my skin,

a weary body plagued with aches and pains.

Were these in existence before my pause?

“If a tree were to fall on an island without human beings, would there be any sound?” asks scientists. “No. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion.”

Awareness is like sound. It only becomes awareness when we pause and pay close attention to what’s happening around us and within us. Only then can an adequate response be triggered. 

The unaware life is not worth living. The unaware life is a mechanical life. It’s not human, it’s programmed, conditioned. We might as well be a stone, a block of wood. (Anthony De Mello)