My wife and I have a favourite pastime. We take leisurely walks through unfamiliar neighborhoods, admiring the houses that we pass. Minimalist, modern homes tend to catch our attention. From the sidewalk, we note the architectural motifs, the complementary landscaping. Sometimes, if the home has large windows, we peer inside and appreciate the warm lighting, the tasteful decor, the smart arrangement of furniture. Once in a while, we catch a glimpse of the inhabitants by the kitchen island preparing dinner, or lounging on the couch in conversation. There is an romantic aura to these sights; the dwellers seem to enact a quintessential happiness. Nested in a lush pad, their lives appear complete. They are set!
The glow of these scenes undoubtedly stem from my own projection. Other people’s lives often appear more ideal than my own. However, I believe that something else is at play. To observe as an outsider a mundane moment in someone else’s life is to stand at a point of clarity. Distance and objectivity affords insight that is not readily available to the principals themselves. The inhabitants whom I observe most likely do not, in that very moment, feel themselves the beneficiaries of great fortune. They are simply making dinner, or lounging in the living room. Similar to others, they are likely afflicted by other worries: work, finances, relationships, health. The comfort and ease that surrounds them fade into an invisible backdrop of everyday blandness. They are neither ignorant nor ungrateful; they simply abide by the distortions imposed by perception. What is close to us is often hard to see. It is from a distance that the scales fall from our eyes and we see more clearly the dignity and beauty of our existence.
The challenge lies in obtaining distance and perspective in the throes of everyday life. We cannot slip from our own skin and observe ourselves as outsiders, nor can we easily become subjects of our own anthropological study. Yet, there are moments when an oblique perspective intervenes in our preoccupation, and suddenly we are struck by rare insights. There is an essential difference between two modes of consciousness: the proximal and the distal. In the proximal, we are engulfed by experience, caught in the content of our lives. Events, encounters, emotions and thoughts keep us in thrall. Our attention and effort coalesce around tasks, responsibilities, threats and points of uncertainty. The fundamental conditions of life fade into a nondescript backdrop. However, in the distal mode we are better able to observe the whole beyond the particular, the context beyond the text. Whereas the proximal occupies us in what is immediate, the distal delivers us to the larger view in which the particulars find their proportion. Our immediate concerns remain active, but their impacts resound within a larger field of awareness that is apt to contain what is immediate. When people are caught in their own drama, there is little room for reflection and perspective. It is when we find a broader, cooler space of distal awareness that movement can occur.
In my clinical practice, I often meet clients in distress, who struggle to see possibilities beyond the adversity that afflicts them. They voice their frustration, ruminate on grievances, revisit painful memories. They are possessed by psychic demons and cannot escape their grip. They are caught in the proximal mode of consciousness. The first step in therapy is to move them away from the proximal and into the distal. Because the ruminative mind feeds on its own content, the initial intervention attempts to down-regulate the nervous system by eliciting parasympathetic responses. The therapist’s own comportment sets the conditions of therapeutic effectiveness. Where the client is agitated, the therapist remains poised and calm, thus providing a psycho-emotive anchor for the client, a baseline to which clients calibrate their own nervous system. Next, we break the ruminative cycle and moderate the affective turmoil using sensory and somatic practices. These include breathing, tactile, sensory and somatic exercises that soften patterns of mentation. We bring awareness to the here and now rather than the there and then. By quieting down nervous activation, we inch closer to a distal mode of reflection.
In the proximal mode of consciousness, one’s own suffering is exacerbated by the perception that others are happy. People who struggle in life are more aware of the absence of distress in others. Friends and colleagues seem happier, more at peace, more financially secure. Out of their affliction, they project a fiction of bliss onto others as a way to make visible the antithesis to their suffering. In one way, this is the psyche’s way of carving a narrative arc for us, creating a brighter story that becomes the armature of hope. We dream: like my friend, I too will find a life partner, or someday I too will have a family. Our imaginations cast us in the roles that we see in our friends and we imagine ourselves enjoying their life. However, this fantasy cuts another way: by projecting ourselves into a fictional state of bliss, the reality of our less-than-perfect existence becomes all the more intolerable. Flights of fantasy must always fall back down to grim reality. Disenchantment thickens when gap between what we want and what we have becomes glaring. We assign to external conditions in the indefinite future the responsibility of building and claiming happiness in the here and now. Projective fantasies tend to erode our ability to live more fully in the present, to cultivate contentment in this very moment, without demands or conditions.
The tendency to see the greener grass on the other side seems to be an adaptive trait of the imaginative psyche, one that bestows hope and serves up disappointment at the same time. However, the intervention does not lie in prohibiting projection and fantasy. If distance and perspective renders the lives of others in blissful glow, then the same insight might emerge if we are able to obtain perspective in our own lives, witness from afar the goodness that is not apparent in the proximal. But how do we impart some distance between our experience and perspective, so that we see the goodness of our situation?
Recently, I returned to Shikoku and completed the second half of the Buddhist pilgrimage that I started in 2023. Alone on the road, I witnessed the sprawling landscaping; lush mountains and winding green waters. In these quiet hours walking, I reflected on my life, the people I’ve met, the adversity and triumph that have marked my passage through the decades. The pilgrimage transported me out of the routines that structured my days. Out on the trail, I was a nobody. My only task each day was to cover distance on foot. Life was reduced to its essence, and in that state of weightlessness, I was able to see my regular life in its beauty and simplicity. I thought about my wife, the sweetness of companionship with her; my dog –– the bond of adoration between us; my daily chores – taking out the trash, cooking meals – which were imbued with dignity and grace. None of these things are remarkable, but they are precious nonetheless. The stability and regularity of our life, which provides a basis of security, can numb our senses and stifle a need for novelty and adventure. When we suspend the routine, step out of our usual personas, we behold a vista that is usually obscured by our defined roles. Thus, in removing myself from the rhythm of my life, I was better able to see its value from afar.
Not all of us have the privilege of stepping away from our busy lives to walk an ancient pilgrimage path. However, we can take moments –– hours if we are lucky –– to dwell in the coolness of solitude, which affords us space and distance for reflection. Silence and stillness form the ground from which formative insights sprout. Weekends away, or an afternoon stroll through a quiet park. Writing in a journal is an excellent way to dwell in reflective stillness, to pause and observe the fleeting hours of this brief life. These quiet moments, stolen from tyrannical duty and responsibility, may seem meagre compared to a month-long walk through rural Japan. However, if we cultivate solitude as an ongoing practice of living, we strengthen our access to the distal. Difficulties will inevitably catch us unprepared. We may sway and falter, but quickly regain our balance because we are not consumed by the malaise. With access to stillness within, we are better able to resile against the storm. In my experience, solitude facilitates depth and maturity. The more we grow in solitude, the less we find strife and chaos tolerable. If we make space for stillness, that stillness becomes a fixture of our inner life; the heart naturally reaches for spacious silence. This is the ripening of a consciousness that has outgrown the preoccupations of the proximal. We do not simply possess peace, but rather peace radiates from within. Through committed inner work, we are able to look at our own lives appreciate its beauty, warts and all. The grass is greener on this side of the fence.