To care too much and allow yourself to be fully absorbed by the passings events of this life is a case of insanity. If you take a moment to investigate what your life really is, start from the beginning and you will see that your memory is rather dodgy in both quality and quantity. There is very little that you can muster up from the start of this crazy little affair called ‘the story of you’. What we do know is that there is quite an eager force pushing and pulling us constantly in the direction of whimsical ambitions and trivial pursuits towards some vague concept of happiness. The strange thing is there is very little moment of pause and rest as the mind churns with the little hamster inside running always for the idea of tomorrow.

Time and space are truly the great illusionists. As long as there is land to travel through and time to keep track of it all, we will find ourselves busy focusing on the outer world and the objects and phenomenon they present. That is the nature of things and there is no way out for the body you find yourself in. Our name and identity and the trajectory of its past, present and future, will always be a character in the story and its role must be played out to the end. But what might be of interest is to begin witnessing the events of our life as if something within us were able to separate from it altogether. Can you be an observer, a member of a staged audience, to the spectacle of the character that is called ‘you’?

We spend quite a bit of energy when we are fully absorbed in ourselves. Being ‘right’ and formulating opinions which are clever may, for some people, exhaust enough sparks of creative juice that by the time the day reaches its end, they may only have enough strength to watch another episode of ‘Desperate Housewives’. The intensity of our attention is focused primarily on what is happening moment to moment, fretting and praying that events turn in the direction most favourable to us. If the situation were taken a tad bit less seriously, there would be some remaining energies available for an inner observer to manifest and follow events from the point of view of psychological separation.

The observer is the only thing in you that can actually learn. It is the only force that could, for the simple reason that it allows itself to wander and wonder outside the box of your identity; to witness what is happening as a whole. Attempt as you read these words to feel the chair you are sitting on and the weight of your body. Notice the objects around you and your eyes darting from left to right. Sense the people in the room or in the building, the sounds in the background, and feel your being as simply one element of it all. The energy you have guided to this practice has fed and therefore created a moment’s life for an inner observer and if you feed that side of you some more, it may be able to one day live side by side your other personalities as they run amok through life.

If the observer doesn’t live in you, then that means you are fully in what they call ‘the box’. There has to be some attention placed on all of the other elements which compose a situation, and the human organism is created such that it is able to do so. If you wonder at the marvels of creation which come through the souls of people such as poets and masters of artistic or technological crafts, keep in mind that instead of the idea of genius, there may be other factors at play, such as the ability to economize the energies of your attention. If we learn to appreciate the concept of separating ourselves from our identity and make the effort to relax ourselves a bit from that subtle anxiety called ‘you’, then something else may be able to grow and have a future worth observing.