Anam Cara

You Cannot Step Outside Your Life

The unknown evokes wonder. If you lose your sense of wonder, you lose the sacramental majesty of the world. Nature is no longer a presence, it is a thing. Your life becomes a dead cage of fact. The sense of the eternal recedes, and time is reduced to routine. Yet the flow of our lives cannot be stopped. This is one of the amazing facts about being in the dance of life. There is no place to step outside. There is no neutral space in human life. There is no place to go to get out of it. There is no little cabin down at the bottom of the garden where the force and familiarity of life stop, and you can sit there in a space outside your life and yourself and look in on both. Once you are in life, it embraces you totally.

This is most evident in the mystery of thinking. You cannot step outside your own thought. As Merleau-Ponty says, “There is no thought to embrace all thought.” Most of the time, we are not even aware of how our thinking encircles everything. When we wake up to how our thoughts create our world, we become conscious of the ways in which we can be blind and limited. Yet even when we decide to be critical and objective about our own thinking, thinking is still the instrument we use in the practice of this criticism. We live every moment of our lives within this relentless reflexivity. Even when we are tired and weary of the patterns of our own thinking, they still shape our vision and guide our actions.