Everything’s Just Fine

I saw two otters yesterday, just after sunrise, as I walked along the seafront. I think they were mother and child, but that’s the guess of an amateur nature lover.

Seeing otters is not a common sight, even in places like here, where they live and breed in reasonable numbers. And I could watch them for more than twenty minutes. We were heading in the same direction. I felt blessed.

Here’s a thing though. You get a far better view on tv. I was seeing them from distances of twenty metres and more. So only the dark outlines of animals swimming along in an otter like way … frequently diving and coming back up. One time I saw the flash of a small fish in a mouth.

Never mind TV close ups though. Even the idea of seeing otters, the one that might play out in our heads, can be more emphatic, seem more real, than the experience of actually seeing them.

But actually seeing them, just like the “idea” of seeing them, is still happening in our conscious minds. That’s where all the “live action”, as well as our imaginations, the TV pictures, and our memories of it all are occurring.

In fact it’s all live action to our conscious minds. And that action plays out without any input from us.

Knowing this has become helpful to me. Because the same is true about other sets of information. Like my anxieties about the world, any “real” experience of the things I have anxiety about, and the TV pictures about worrying things happening in distance lands.

It’s all right here, playing out in this exact way only for me, and only on the canvas of my own consciousness. It’s all revealing itself afresh. And it all will pass.

And Everything’s Just Fine