The most fantastical & important part of every journey
Awareness
Dear Reader,
Until my late thirties, I didn’t really know much about personal change. Even though I had called three different countries home by then (there were plenty of physical journeys halfway around the world), I hadn’t changed. I was still the same person I was at ages 9, 12, 24, or 32, just more so, if that makes sense. I, however, was adaptable. What’s the difference? To adapt is to respond to the environment, and though it is a part of change, you can adapt, a kind of shapeshifting, to suit your new surroundings without intrinsic or fundamental change.
About a month and a half before my 38th birthday, I was in the middle of a conversation with a new friend when I was suddenly struck with the awareness that I lacked adequate personhood within relationships. (Selfhood and personhood are complex philosophical topics, and here I am using the word personhood to describe the state of being a person and not just a role within relationship.) I remember it was a hot summer day1. My new friend and I had run into each other at the neighborhood shopping center. We were both in a rush, but we decided to find a place to sit down for a few minutes for a quick chat. We found a bench, partly sheltered by the incomplete shade of a palm tree, in the faux-plaza built in the middle of the shopping center. It was just before the solstice, the kind of summer day when the unrelenting yellowness makes you long for a cool, dark room that you need never emerge from. We’d just become friends, so in that first bloom of the kind of friendship that seems to hold great potential. Where everything the other says feels like a priceless jewel that you must hold up to the light and examine from all sides. We were talking about the kind of people we were and, out of nowhere (or somewhere), an awareness arose in my mind, ostensibly my very first one, that I easily fell into what the role demanded within a relationship. That I was quick to let go of who I was to conform to the role. I don’t know what we talked about after. It was like crossing under an arch and emerging somehow enlarged, to the extent that you can’t ever cross back. I know I must’ve said goodbye and driven home, but all I felt was the shock of the discovery. It colored everything. I felt I had to spread my life out on a table and examine every part with the lens of this new awareness. And that what I'd been doing until then, my way of living and being in the world, was not going to work for me anymore. (In case you’re wondering, this awareness led to a lot of fundamental change and self-discovery.)
Here’s what I find most fascinating: I did not know I needed to change anything until I did. I am sure you have experienced this, this feeling of you aren't aware until you are aware.
Awareness is both the end of one journey and the beginning of the next. I think of awareness when I think of arriving somewhere new. In my experience, awareness is the most fascinating, fantastical, and important part of every journey. We can foster it by leaving room for introspection and reflection, but there’s still magic around it.
I want to share a fantastical image with you, one I wrote last summer, on how I imagine the arrival of awareness. (It’s still the most popular post on my Substack.)
When I think of the all-important arrival of awareness, I imagine a secluded lake in the middle of a forest. The surface looks like a sheet of glass or a mirror, gray and a little green. The surrounding forest is still and quiet until it suddenly starts to rain. Not much, just a few drops at a time. Plop. Plop. Plop. A little rain from the passing clouds.
When the raindrops touch the surface of the water, they create ripples. You probably don't know this2 but ripples are the movement of tiny, underwater dervishes. These dervishes are just under the surface, asleep. And when a drop falls, the long tunic-clad dervishes right underneath awaken. The dervishes know their job is very important, so they move quickly. They assemble in circles under every drop, holding hands. And they go round and round. As they spin in ever-widening circles, they sing together, their voices rising in a high-pitched chorus, one you can only feel and not hear. The song is an invitation, a call just for you. It's a call to action. For you to do something about something.
That’s how I imagine the arrival of awareness that leads from I Have No Clue Anything Is Wrong to Something Isn’t Working (or similar). The dervishes spin wildly, setting off more circles. They might even form little waves. I imagine that’s how awareness grows.
And though the rain may stop and the lake returns to its earlier placidity, the water is no longer the same. ( I am not a physicist, and maybe things go back to the pre-rain state of some equilibrium, but we are readers and writers here, and you know what I mean.)
Sometimes, it takes years of many such moments before you realize some mystery is calling you to change, leave certainty, and go on a journey.
Dear Reader, I’d love to hear from you. What do you think of the arrival of awareness? What part of the journey is most important in your experience?
Best,
Priya
I don’t like summers. For all the astrology geeks, subterranean twelfth house transits are the very devil, aren’t they?
Because I just made it up.
“Here’s what I find most fascinating: I did not know I needed to change anything until I did. I am sure you have experienced this, this feeling of you aren't aware until you are aware.” — I so relate to this and I totally love how you articulated it, Priya.
Also, your image of awareness, as represented by the ripples in the lake, is beautiful! :)
I love that Priya. Awareness as water ripples and then ever-expanding waves. Great visual. Thank you for the lovely essay. 🙏❤️