Sneaking Suspicion
…of what we overlook while looking
While recently on vacation with my wondrous wife and three children in Fiji, I found myself immersed in paradise: warm air, glimmering sea, the laughter of kids playing in the water.
And yet, I was reading. Drawn in, as I so often am, by the written word. Thoughts on philosophy, spirituality, the nature of self. Words from those who’ve spent their lives circling the mystery of what it means to exist.
Then came a whisper. A small voice in the back of my mind…
“You’re missing it.”
This moment.
Right now.
The miner bird from Huxley’s Island echoed suddenly in my memory: “Attention! Attention! Here and now, boys. Here and now.”
The truth isn’t in any text. Not even in this poem that I wrote about this feeling.
But maybe it’s hiding behind the invitation those words offer:
To look up.
To see this life.
To be here, in this moment.
And in that recognition,
we discover our own secret of existence,
and begin to write our own story.
Sneaking Suspicion
If left alone, I could spend all day gathering the echoes of wiser voices, stacking them neatly in notebooks, highlighting the sentences that seem to point somewhere important. The scent of discovery is intoxicating. Each book a doorway, each paragraph a trail of breadcrumbs leading deeper into the forest of thought. I have wandered that forest with joy. Certain that truth was only a matter of patience, a long enough trail, a sharp enough eye, a willingness to keep looking. And I love the looking. Love the thrill of uncovering a forgotten phrase in some overlooked margin. A single sentence that stirs something ancient and alive. But lately, persistently, a suspicion has curled itself around the edges of all my seeking. That if I followed every thread, read every sacred text, assembled a mosaic of insight from a thousand lives — what I’d find, at the center, would be this: The life I missed while searching for it. The laughter of children drifting in from outside, the glimmering of sunlight dancing on the sea, the answer already waiting, unwritten, in the soft murmur of now.
Background music in audio by Kumea Sound
Oh man.. I've totally done this too. Letting my passionate interest (albeit genuine) get in the way of being present with loved ones. I love the poem as well!
What a beautiful expression of the difficult choice between the seduction of ideas and words and the seduction of the world—the setting sun, the laughter of children. And what if you were to have another sneaking suspicion—that both are illusory, not one more real than the other? Is the fear of missing the real merely the grass being greener on the other side? And this duality, this bloody duality; splitting us down the middle with words and more words that craft difference. That tiny brain of ours,itself split into two, enjoying the trickle of nectar that flows down each realisation that is not a realisation at all but a resonance of a profound and eternal longing. The longing to be one and not two; a longing to be one with our thoughts and experiences; to be one with the one we love; and finally to be one with the one we are all a part of. The one and only one.