The door is open. The air of the here enters, cool, bringing with it the scent of earth after rain, the sound of a hammer beating in the distance, the weight of one's own body on a wooden chair. We are sitting on the threshold. But our gaze is fixed on a small screen showing us a hurricane on the other side of the ocean. The storm is real, but it does not wet our skin. Yet, it wets our soul. This is the trick. They have taught us to fear the storm that does not touch us and to forget the wind that caresses our wrists. We live in a constant state of sensory hijacking. Life speaks to us with a simple, tangible, immediate vocabulary. We respond with borrowed language, made of abstractions and statistical catastrophes.
The most precious capital, the one that cannot be stolen, is our attention. It is the currency with which we pay for every moment of real life. And we pour it by the shovelful into a bottomless pit of unlived facts. We are selling off our only wealth for noise. Noise gives the illusion of being at the throbbing heart of things. In truth, it is just a carpet that smothers the beat of our own heart.
The Price of the Ghost
Let's do the math. A bare balance sheet of what we gain and lose in this exchange.
- We gain: an opinion on everything. We lose: an authentic feeling about something.
- We gain: awareness of a thousand distant dangers. We lose: the ability to navigate the small inner danger of boredom, loneliness, indecision.
- We gain: virtual connections. We lose: the connection with the person to our left, with the tree to our right, with the sky above us.
- We gain: the story of the world in real time. We lose: our story in real time.
No man can serve two masters. Either you will love the instant and listen to it, or you will love the tale of the instant and be possessed by it. There is no middle ground.
Global disorder becomes our inner disorder because we opened the doors to it. We invited it to sit at our table, to eat our food, to disturb our sleep. Peace, then, is not a negotiation with the world. It is an eviction decree. It is the sober quiet that follows when a noisy guest is thrown out. The silence that remains is not empty. It is full of finally recognized presences: the rhythm of your breath, the project left half-finished on the table, the changing light, the memory of a laugh that is yours, only yours.
The here and now is not an exotic destination. It is your room. It is the matter you are made of. Returning to it does not require a journey. It only requires the courage to stop looking elsewhere. Life is really happening. It is here. It is knocking. It has the face of your today.