““The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the ‘I’ out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate ‘I’ or mind can be found.”

Alan Watts
Excerpted from ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

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The low levels, or not so low levels, of anxiety that accompany our everyday life appear when "we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the 'I' out of the experience." Why is that the case? Recently I realized how automatically I have an opinion or commentary, or a story about any experience that appears. It became clear that when my thinking mind gets busy talking about an experience, I have already stepped out of that direct experience. So, are we "trying to get the "I" out of the experience" because the intimate connection with it is too much to "feel" directly? This is an interesting area for reflection. If experience, that can only ever happen "now," is all that is real, how does our practice support finding and abiding in awake presence across all experience as it appears in our awareness?