“You cannot feel real emotions while identified.”
P.D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way
Mid August, lunchtime, a long table under a pergola by the coast. Extended family has arrived, the morning was spent cooking together, and the table holds that quantity of food only a peak summer feast day can produce. Too much, wonderful, unmanageable. The kids are already on their third plate before I’ve even sat down.
For years I lived two opposite versions of this kind of day. In the first, I let go completely, eat, drink, laugh, and by the end of the meal I don’t remember a single moment with any clarity, just a pleasant fog of flavors and overlapping voices. In the second, the years when I “worked on myself” with more zeal than intelligence, I spent the meal watching myself eat with a detachment so rigid it ruined the pleasure for me and the celebration for everyone else, sitting at the table like an inspector instead of a father.
Neither of those is Presence. They’re just two different ways of being absent.
