“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.”

                                                                  ~ Charles Simic

For the past several weeks we have been discussing the nature of who we are being when we are with other people; and specifically, inquiring into what is it that has certain people in a group shine like a lighthouse—who are they being?—while the rest of the group is busily doing whatever it is they habitually do when they are with other people?

The powerful action to take regarding being is to simply observe it.  You can’t do anything to impact being; anything you do is more of the same, just different.

When I was a kid I kept a cold all winter, with two or three bedridden bouts with the flu as well.  By the time I was in my thirties, it had gotten somewhat better: now only three or four bad colds each winter, with a case of the flu thrown in now and then.  So here I was, thirty-six years old, in February, thirty-five degrees and drizzling rain, and I’m running a boatyard.  We are building a wooden ship; I’m outside all day in the rain, and here it comes: the sore throat and the feverish feeling that signals the start of yet another bad cold.  I plan to go home after work, take a hot shower, and go to bed.

But then something extraordinary happened; it changed my life forever.  After my shower, one of my employees called and said, “Let’s go down to Gloucester and see a movie.”  I went with him, and I got home late that night.  I had completely forgotten about the cold.  It was only the next morning, back at the boatyard—again out in the drizzling rain—that I finally remembered and realized that the sore throat and fever were gone.  At that instant something happened.  The world shifted.  Time seemed to stop; the mental chatter stopped; I was totally present.  And then a single thought ran through my mind, “I don’t have to go to school any more.”

That was thirty-three years ago.  Since that time I have had maybe four colds.  A shift in being occurred on that February morning, as I was standing out there in the rain.  I had a direct experience of reality.  The whole edifice of explanations and knowledge, everything I knew about colds, collapsed.  Reality shifted.

Observation allows for shifts in reality; change (doing) merely rearranges the already existing elements of the current reality into a different order: more of the same, just different.

Photo from www.villagecraftsmen.com