To see so much, and yet not really see anything. To read so much, and yet not really understand anything. To talk so much, and yet not really say anything. To listen so much, and yet not really hear anything. So much of the meaning gets lost somewhere in between, and where exactly it goes is worth a very long time trying to work out.
It is not a small loss. Consider how much passes through a single ordinary day. Thousands of images. Hundreds of sentences. Faces, weather, news, the particular way somebody said something at four in the afternoon that was noticed and then never thought about again. All of it reaches us and none of it is withheld. And by evening almost none of it has arrived, and the difference between reaching and arriving is the whole of this question.
We are not careless people, and that is worth saying before anything else. Nobody is choosing to let their life go past unnoticed. Something has happened to the receiving, and it has happened gradually, and nobody was warned about it.
Where it is lost in seeing
Something appears in front of us, and before it has been looked at, it has already been identified. That is a tree. That is a person we know. That is the same street walked down every day. The naming happens instantly, before any looking, and once a thing has been named the looking stops, because naming feels exactly like completion.
So we walk through days made almost entirely of labels rather than of things. The tree is not seen, the label is confirmed and filed again. The person is not seen, the file is retrieved and consulted. And what is actually there, which is never quite the same twice and never has been, goes past entirely unencountered.
This is efficient and nobody is proposing that it stop. It is how anybody gets through a day without complete exhaustion, and a person who genuinely saw everything freshly would not be able to cross a room. But it does mean that the world we move through is mostly a set of our own descriptions, and that it has been many years since most of us met anything at all directly.
Where it is lost in reading
Reading is worse, because there we are actively collecting rather than merely passing through. Something is read and immediately filed. Agreed with or disagreed with, useful or not useful, already known or genuinely new. The sorting happens as the eye moves down the page and never lags behind it.
And what was there underneath the sentence, the thing the person was actually trying to reach towards, is passed over completely, because we were busy deciding what to do with it. A page can be read very carefully and completely missed, and whoever missed it will be entirely certain that they have understood, because they can produce an accurate summary of it on request.
Understanding is not summary. A great many things get summarised beautifully by people who did not understand them in the slightest and were praised for the summaries. What understanding actually requires is to let something in without immediately doing anything to it, and almost everything about the way we are taught to read is designed to prevent exactly that from happening.
Where it is lost in speaking
We talk a very great deal. In any ordinary day the number of words is enormous, and almost none of them carry anything at all from one person to another.
Some of that is necessary and unavoidable. Arrangements have to be made and information has to move. But a great deal of it is something else, which is talking in order to fill, or in order to be seen a particular way, or to prevent a silence from occurring in which something real might have to be said. And that kind of talking has a particular quality to it. It uses a large number of words and transmits nothing whatsoever, and both people can feel it happening, and neither will mention it.
The words we have are also imprecise, and this is worth saying honestly rather than blaming ourselves for everything. Say one thing to ten people and it becomes ten different things, each shaped by whatever that person already had inside them to receive it with. Language is the best instrument we have and it is a leaky vessel, and a great deal of the meaning is lost in the carrying before anybody has even had the chance to mishear it.
Where it is lost in listening
Here is the largest loss of all, and nobody is exempt from it. Most of what passes for listening is waiting. The other person is speaking and we are preparing, agreeing, disagreeing, remembering something similar of our own, deciding what to say the moment the gap comes.
None of that is listening. Listening is nothing at all. It is being empty enough that somebody else's words can occupy the space, and it is remarkably difficult, and it can be done for perhaps forty seconds before something in us starts producing again and the space closes.
And people know when they are being heard. It is completely unmistakable and it cannot be faked by anybody however skilled. It is so rare that when it does happen, people will often say considerably more than they intended to, because they have not been given that room in a very long time and did not know how much they needed it. To be heard is one of the few things nobody can pretend to give.
Where the incompleteness actually lies
So where does it go, all this meaning? It is not lost in transmission at all, which is where we usually look for it. It is lost in reception, and the reason is that there is nobody home to receive it.
We are not here. Some part of us is in the next hour, or in the previous conversation, or in a worry that has been running quietly for a week. The thing arrives at the door, and the door is answered by a small distracted portion of a person, and the rest is elsewhere entirely. So almost nothing gets taken in, and the small portion that answered cannot possibly hold it.
The incompleteness is not in the world and it is not in the things reaching us, which are as full and as various as they have ever been. It is in us, and specifically in how little of us is actually present at the moment when something arrives. That is not a comfortable conclusion, because it removes every available explanation that lives outside ourselves.
Being still enough
To actually see, to actually hear, to actually understand, something has to stop. Not the world, which will not stop for anybody and should not be asked to. The producing. The commentary, the sorting, the preparing, the endless low-level manufacture that goes on inside us from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep.
Stillness is not the absence of activity. It is the absence of that. And it cannot be forced, because forcing is simply more producing in a different costume, and everybody who has tried to make themselves still knows exactly how that goes. It arrives when we stop adding, and then only if we are willing to wait through a stretch that is genuinely uncomfortable, because the first thing that surfaces when we stop is everything we have been outrunning.
Most people turn back at that point, which is completely understandable, and almost everybody turns back a great many times. But on the other side of it there is a quality of attention that changes what a day is made of. Nothing in the day has to change at all. Only how much of us is there while it happens.
What we were taught to be
There is something else standing in the way, and it goes back a great deal further than any of this. From very early on, we are taught to be small.
Not in words. Nobody sits a child down and instructs them to want less from life. It happens in a thousand small corrections spread across a childhood. Do not ask that. Do not want that, it is not for people like us. Be sensible. Be realistic. Do not get above yourself. Each of these is meant kindly and most of them are meant protectively, and each is a slight narrowing.
By the time a person is grown, the narrowing has been so thorough that the walls are mistaken for the edges of what is possible. So we live inside a small allocation, carefully, and we are frightened of anything outside it. Fear of what is unfamiliar. Fear of being conspicuous. Fear of trying something and being seen to fail at it in front of people who know us. Every one of those fears was given to us before we had any way of examining it, by people who had been given the same set and were passing on what they sincerely believed was protection.
A life run on that is not a bad life and it should not be heard as one. It is simply very much smaller than the person living it. And the smallness is not visible from inside, because everybody nearby is living inside the same allocation and calling it the world.
Opening to what is actually here
What would it mean to open ourselves to life beyond the anxiety and the fear? This needs answering carefully, because it is very easy to make it sound like an adventure, and that is a smaller thing than what is meant.
It does not require going anywhere. Most of the unexplored is not in another country and cannot be reached by travelling. It is in the hours we already have, in the people we already know, in whatever is directly in front of us and has been for years without ever being properly looked at. The unexplored is mostly the unattended, sitting exactly where it has always been.
And it asks something quite specific, which is the willingness to be affected by something. To let a thing in without first deciding what it is worth and what it will cost. That is the whole of it, and it is considerably harder than travelling, because it cannot be arranged in advance, there is nothing to prepare, and there is nothing whatsoever to show for it afterwards.
Every time anybody does it, something arrives that they had no framework for, and it takes time to settle, and it changes the shape of what they thought they were doing with their life. Every time they decline, the day passes correctly and pleasantly and they could not name a single thing about it by the following week.
The question that is left
There is no method for being present, and everybody who has offered one has been describing what it feels like from inside rather than saying how to get there. Years of writing about this do not produce a procedure.
What there is instead is a question worth asking at the end of a day. It can be asked without much hope, most nights, and occasionally it produces something. Of everything that reached us today, what actually arrived?
Usually the answer is very little, and the little is never what anybody would have predicted at the start of the day. It is not the important meeting or the significant conversation. It is something somebody said in passing, or a few seconds of a certain quality of light, or a moment when somebody's face changed and there happened to be somebody looking. Small things, which had been offered all day, in enormous quantity, to a person who was mostly not there.
Everything reaches us. Almost nothing arrives. And the difference between those two, added up across a whole life, is not a detail or a matter of degree. It may be the entire difference between having lived and having been present while a life went past.
