The Speed of Perception

I’ve been thinking about last week’s newsletter quite a bit.

I wrote that we never really encounter the world directly.

We encounter it through ourselves.

That idea has stayed with me because over the past week I’ve started noticing just how quickly my own perception changes.

Not because the world changes.

Because I do.

Lately I’ve realized that many of the interactions I’m least proud of have something in common.

I’m in a hurry.

Sometimes it’s obvious.

I’m running late.

Trying to answer one more email.

Trying to finish one more project before I leave.

Trying to squeeze one more thing into the day.

But more often it’s quieter than that.

Nothing urgent is actually happening.

I simply feel urgent.

And when I begin living from that place, something strange happens.

The people around me quietly stop being people.

The driver who doesn’t accelerate quickly enough after the light turns green.

The person standing in the middle of the grocery aisle deciding which pasta to buy.

Someone taking a little too long to place an order at a coffee shop.

Even the people I love most.

Without ever deciding to, they become interruptions.

Delays.

Obstacles standing between me and wherever I think I need to be next.

If you asked me what matters most in my life, I’d tell you it’s relationships.

Connection.

Presence.

I’d believe every word.

Which makes it surprising how quickly another human being can become an inconvenience the moment I begin feeling rushed.

I’ve started wondering whether speed changes more than movement.

Perhaps it changes perception itself.

When I’m unhurried, I notice things.

The way the wind moves through the trees.

The conversation happening at the next table.

The expression on someone’s face when they think no one is watching.

People become wonderfully complicated.

I notice small acts of kindness that would have been invisible an hour earlier.

Everyone seems to be carrying an entire world I’ll never fully understand.

When I’m hurried, that richness begins to disappear.

Everything becomes flatter.

The world reorganizes itself around a single question.

Does this help me get where I’m trying to go?

If the answer is no, it begins to feel like friction.

Nothing outside me has changed.

But something inside me has.

That thought brought me back to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Last week I mentioned his idea that we never meet the world directly.

We meet it through ourselves.

I don’t think I appreciated just how radical that idea really is.

Because if it’s true, then changing the state we’re in literally changes the world we experience.

A hurried mind doesn’t simply move through the same world faster.

It inhabits a different one.

People become obstacles.

Time becomes scarce.

Possibility narrows.

Relationship gives way to efficiency.

I’ve started wondering if urgency doesn’t simply speed life up.

Perhaps it compresses it.

A complicated person becomes a slow driver.

A conversation becomes something to finish.

An afternoon becomes a schedule.

A day becomes a list.

A life becomes a series of destinations.

Urgency doesn’t only change what I notice.

It changes what the world is allowed to become.

And I’ve started noticing that I rarely recognize this while it’s happening.

I usually notice it afterward.

I’ll replay a conversation later that evening and realize I never actually listened.

I was waiting.

Waiting for the conversation to end.

Waiting for my turn.

Waiting to get back to whatever I thought mattered more.

The strange thing is that while it’s happening, it doesn’t feel like impatience.

It feels like reality.

I think about this almost every time I lead a sound bath.

One of the first things I notice isn’t how people walk into the room.

It’s the speed of their attention.

Many people arrive physically present but mentally somewhere else.

Still finishing work.

Still replaying a conversation.

Already anticipating tomorrow.

It’s as though the mind has forgotten that it only has one place it can ever actually be.

About twenty minutes into many sound baths, something subtle begins to happen.

Not always.

But often.

The urgency starts loosening its grip.

Not because people decide to relax.

Because they stop trying to arrive somewhere else.

The body stops negotiating.

The mind becomes just a little less interested in what’s next.

People often describe the experience as spacious.

I don’t think they’re describing the room.

I think they’re describing themselves.

There’s suddenly enough room for memory to appear.

Enough room for grief.

Enough room for joy.

Enough room for silence.

Enough room to notice something that had been there all along.

Perhaps that’s why I continue returning to practices like yoga, meditation, and sound baths.

Not because they replace one way of seeing with another.

Because they remind me that I’m seeing.

They interrupt the momentum long enough for me to notice the lens through which I’m meeting the world.

That has quietly changed the questions I ask myself.

Not,

“Why did I react that way?”

But,

“Who was I when I reacted that way?”

Because perhaps the answer isn’t hidden in the event.

Perhaps it’s hidden in the person who was experiencing it.

Lately I’ve started asking myself another question whenever impatience begins creeping in.

Not,

“Why is everyone getting in my way?”

But,

“What am I in such a hurry to reach?”

Sometimes there really is somewhere important to be.

But often the urgency has outlived the reason for it.

My body is still running long after the emergency has passed.

Maybe the opposite of hurry isn’t slowness.

Slowness can still be distracted.

Maybe the opposite of hurry is availability.

Availability to this conversation.

This person.

This moment.

Availability to notice that the cashier isn’t slowing my day down.

They’re living a day of their own.

Availability to remember that every person I meet is carrying a world just as complicated as mine.

I’ve started thinking that presence isn’t really about slowing life down.

Life moves at whatever speed it moves.

Presence is refusing to let that speed determine the depth with which we experience it.

Because in the end…

The world hasn’t become smaller.

My perception has.

And every time I become available to this moment again…

The world quietly becomes vast