The Difference Between Existing and Participating

There are entire stretches of my life I can prove happened but don’t particularly remember living.

I went to work.

I raised children.

I cooked dinners, paid bills, drove thousands of kilometres, attended meetings, bought groceries, remembered birthdays, solved problems and did all the other things that constitute a life when written down on paper.

I was there.

That’s the strange part.

I wasn’t unconscious. I wasn’t wandering around in some fugue state. I was competent. Often extremely competent.

I just wasn’t entirely in it.

For most of my life, I didn’t know there was a difference.

I thought this was adulthood.

You get up. You do what needs doing. You think about the next thing while doing the current thing. You keep moving.

And because I was good at it, I had no particular reason to question it.

Competence can hide a lot.

Including the fact that you may have become very good at managing a life you aren’t actually experiencing.

I Thought I Was Just Efficient

There is a particular kind of pride that comes with being the person who can handle things.

Give me a problem.

Give me a crisis.

Give me something that needs organizing.

Give me ten things that have gone wrong simultaneously and require someone to remain calm.

Fine.

I can do that.

What I didn’t understand was that the same ability that allowed me to remain calm when things went wrong also allowed me to remain slightly removed when things went right.

That’s considerably less useful.

Nobody congratulates you for emotionally distancing yourself from a perfectly nice Tuesday afternoon.

There is no annual performance review where someone writes:

Excellent ability to miss her own life while remaining highly productive.

But I think that is what I did for a very long time.

I existed inside my life without fully participating in it.

And those are not the same thing.

Existing is largely logistical.

Did I get through the day?

Did everyone get fed?

Did I answer the email?

Did I solve the problem?

Did I remember the appointment?

Participating asks different questions.

Did I notice the day?

Did I enjoy anything?

Did something surprise me?

Did I laugh?

Was I actually listening when someone I loved was talking?

Did I taste the food?

Did I look at the sky?

Was I there?

That last question has become increasingly uncomfortable.

Because sometimes the answer is no.

Survival Can Look Remarkably Normal

When people hear the word survival, I think we imagine something dramatic.

Running.

Fighting.

Escaping.

Collapsing.

We don’t necessarily picture someone sitting in a meeting with a notebook, taking excellent minutes.

But survival has quieter disguises.

Sometimes it looks like competence.

Sometimes it looks like independence.

Sometimes it looks like never needing anyone.

Sometimes it looks like always knowing where the exits are.

Sometimes it looks like being excellent in an emergency because some part of you has spent decades waiting for one.

And sometimes it looks like living a few inches outside your own experience.

Trauma researchers have a word for some versions of this: dissociation. Psychiatrist Judith Herman has written extensively about the ways people can disconnect from overwhelming experiences and how responses that were once protective can continue long after the original danger has passed.

That explanation made sense to me.

But I also don’t want to turn every distracted cup of coffee into a diagnosis.

Sometimes we’re simply distracted.

Sometimes we’re tired.

Sometimes phones have turned all of us into demented little magpies chasing the next shiny notification.

And sometimes the modern world genuinely requires too much of our attention.

But I also think there is another possibility worth considering.

Some of us learned very early that being fully present wasn’t particularly comfortable.

So we became good at leaving without actually going anywhere.

The Strange Skill of Being There Without Being There

I could attend a dinner and have a perfectly good time.

At least according to all available evidence.

I talked.

I laughed.

I asked questions.

I liked the people.

If you had taken a photograph, nothing would have appeared wrong.

But there were times when I felt as though I were performing the actions of a person enjoying herself rather than actually experiencing enjoyment.

That’s difficult to explain if you’ve never felt it.

It isn’t necessarily sadness.

It isn’t that you don’t care.

It is more like a thin pane of glass between you and whatever is happening.

You can see everything.

You can hear everything.

You can respond.

But you’re not quite touching it.

For years, I assumed everyone experienced life this way.

Apparently I have spent a surprising amount of my adulthood discovering that things I assumed were universal were, in fact, not.

This has been inconvenient.

Also illuminating.

Nearly Half Our Lives Somewhere Else

There is research suggesting that even people without a history of trauma spend an astonishing amount of their lives mentally elsewhere.

Psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert famously used an iPhone-based study to ask people what they were doing, what they were thinking about and how they felt.

Their minds wandered about 47 percent of the time.

Nearly half.

Which makes me feel slightly better about occasionally arriving somewhere and realizing my brain apparently made the drive without consulting me.

But the more interesting finding was that people tended to be less happy when their minds wandered.

Even when the activity itself wasn’t particularly enjoyable, being mentally present for it was associated with greater happiness than being somewhere else in their heads.

I keep coming back to that.

Because we spend enormous amounts of time trying to improve the content of our lives.

Better house.

Better job.

Better body.

Better vacation.

Better morning routine.

Better kitchen.

Better skincare.

Better storage containers for the better kitchen.

There is apparently no limit to the number of things we can purchase in an attempt to finally become a person who has her life together.

But what if part of the problem isn’t what we’re doing?

What if we’re simply not there for it?

I Started Noticing What I Hadn’t Noticed

Once I understood that I had spent much of my life in survival mode, I started questioning things I had previously considered personality traits.

Am I naturally hyper-independent?

Or did I learn not to rely on people?

Am I unusually calm in emergencies?

Or did my nervous system spend decades rehearsing for disaster?

Do I genuinely prefer keeping people at a distance?

Or did distance once feel safer?

Do I dislike slowing down?

Or does stillness leave me alone with myself in a way constant activity doesn’t?

Those aren’t questions with tidy answers.

I distrust tidy answers anyway.

Human beings are not IKEA furniture. There is no little instruction booklet tucked inside us explaining which screw went where.

But asking the questions has changed something.

Because once you realize you might have been standing slightly outside your own life, you start wondering what it would mean to step into it.

Which Turns Out to Be Surprisingly Uncomfortable

You would think becoming more present would feel wonderful.

Birdsong.

Sunlight.

Coffee.

Gratitude.

Cue tasteful acoustic guitar.

That has not entirely been my experience.

Sometimes being present feels lovely.

Sometimes it feels irritating.

Sometimes boring.

Sometimes uncomfortable.

Occasionally it makes me want to pick up my phone within approximately eleven seconds.

I started experimenting with very small acts of participation.

Drinking coffee without doing something else.

Eating without reading.

Walking without treating the walk solely as exercise.

Listening to someone without preparing my answer while they were still talking.

Looking around when I went somewhere instead of immediately thinking about what came next.

Tiny things.

Almost embarrassingly tiny.

And yet I began noticing how often my body was in one place while my attention had already left.

There is a difference between knowing something happened and remembering what it felt like when it happened.

One is information.

The other is experience.

I have a great deal of information about my life.

I’m trying to collect more experience.

This Is Not a Campaign Against Autopilot

I don’t think we need to become fully conscious of every moment.

That sounds exhausting.

I don’t need a profound spiritual relationship with loading the dishwasher.

Sometimes the dishwasher just needs loading.

Autopilot is useful. Human brains developed it for a reason. Familiar tasks shouldn’t require the same concentration as landing an airplane.

The question isn’t whether we sometimes operate automatically.

The question is whether we can still choose when not to.

Can I come back when something matters?

Can I notice the person sitting across from me?

Can I recognize when I’m enjoying myself?

Can I allow myself to enjoy myself without immediately turning the experience into something productive?

That last one may require further research.

Possibly extensive field trials involving bakeries.

I Don’t Want to Just Get Through It Anymore

For a long time, getting through things was one of my greatest skills.

Get through the difficult day.

The difficult year.

The crisis.

The loss.

The workweek.

The winter.

The next problem.

Keep going.

There is dignity in that. Sometimes getting through is exactly what survival requires.

But eventually I had to ask an uncomfortable question.

What happens when there is nothing left to get through?

What if this is the life?

Not the preparation for it.

Not the difficult section before the good part begins.

Not the waiting room.

This.

The coffee.

The drive.

The ridiculous conversation.

The book.

The rain against the window.

The afternoon where nothing particularly important happens.

The apple fritter you drove much too far to buy.

The person beside you laughing.

The ten minutes when the light changes and suddenly the ordinary world looks different.

Maybe participating in life isn’t about becoming endlessly mindful or grateful.

Maybe it’s much simpler.

Maybe it’s noticing when you’re here.

And staying for a while.

I spent decades learning how to survive my life.

Now I want to find out what happens when I actually participate in it.

I don’t entirely know how to do that yet.

Which, increasingly, seems to be the point.