Gently Bewildered
“We know not through intellect but through experience.”
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
It’s hard to put into words what’s going on for me these days. I might be going through a phase, or I’m entering a completely new awareness of who I am and what it means to be alive.
My cognitive understanding of the world, as well as my somatic experience of it, seems way less familiar and predictable. Rather, the dominant experience I’m having is that of gentle bewilderment.
I’m bewildered by my capacity to observe myself in amusement, love, and care, noticing my all-too-familiar reactive patterns in all-too-familiar situations without being so attached to them and so overwhelmed by them. There is this not-so-familiar sense of “just playing around for a bit”, and it feels great!
Alongside, I have a visceral experience of my core, the middle of my body, shaping up. I can clearly feel it. There’s an internal sense of clearing and space, which is full of light yet simultaneously disconcerting - but only if I give in to the idea that this spaciousness needs to be promptly filled with new intellectual concepts, notions, and certainties.
In all these experiences, I find myself with an unexpected sense of who I am. Or maybe it’s who I am becoming. Or maybe it’s discovering who I was all along but had been kept in check by so much thinking, planning and organizing.
From this perspective, I seem to be seeing the world with a beginner’s eyes: I am of this world, but not entirely so, at least not of the world shaped by chaos, confusion, and separation – a world that I’ve known only too well.
It’s becoming the most pleasurable pastime to just be with myself, to go about my daily life and routine alongside this newly found companion of a more aware, yet bewildered me, which strangely brings on a heightened sense of (inner) safety and timelessness.
This state of bliss and what seems like a healthy detachment from the outside world has recently remained for more than a few days. Maybe it’s an exponentially growing honeymoon phase. Or maybe it will be gone tomorrow and there will be more challenging phases.
In any case, even when my intellect’s old strategies of protecting and guiding me through its theories gently return, I can recognize now that they were never meant to replace that deep, counter-intuitive, profoundly human knowing that arises out of a genuine relationship with myself - which I try to explain in words, even as words only take me so far.