“I had no idea she wanted to leave me!”

Author

Jamil Vanheyningen
February 25, 2024

One of the best books I read in 2023!

Imagine I knocked you out, kidnapped you, and took you out to the middle of nowhere. When you wake up, I tell you: “Find your way home.”

What is your first question?

I’m 99% sure it’ll be “Where am I?”

After all, it’s an important question. If you don’t know where you are, how are you supposed to know which direction leads home?

Your ability to reach your desired destination depends on your awareness of where you are now.

We recognize this as true, yet in daily life, we rarely ask ourselves “Where am I?”.

Whether you care to admit it or not, you are often operating on assumptions. It’s why so many investments and relationships seem to fall apart out of nowhere.

  • “That correction came out of nowhere.”

  • “I had no idea she wanted to leave me!”

  • “He never let on that he was sick, let alone terminally ill!”

The truth, however, is much simpler: The signs were always there, you just never cared to look.

  • Greed in finance is only praised as confidence until you lose it all.

  • Spouses often do give you enough time and signs to figure out that they are falling out of love with you.

  • The sick sometimes show the onset of illness in a personality change, weight loss, or increased time spent alone.

But I’m not suggesting that awareness alone can always save your relationship or your sick friend. Some things, for better or worse, are unavoidable.

Instead, awareness allows you to prepare yourself so that when things get to their worst, you’ve had time to brace yourself and act on a plan you’ve been laying out ever since you noticed the first sign that things were headed south.

At its best, ignoring what’s in front of you will rob you of beautiful moments or leave you surprised often.

At its worst, a lack of awareness can kill you.

But awareness is not just a skill for avoiding pain — it is also integral to living an enjoyable life.

In his book Awareness, Anthony De Mello perfectly defined the nature of awareness: “What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.”

Being aware of what you are made of — good and bad — will allow you to change the parts of yourself that you don’t like.

Likewise, the people and places around you are giving you signs at every moment about what they really mean and how they really feel. Being aware of these motivations saves you from the danger of acting uninformed.

But I find that awareness is most rewarding when it doesn’t bring about any change. Sometimes, you don’t need to do anything except notice something and revel in its beauty.

Before I leave you with some examples of what awareness can look like, here are some nature-related ones Marcus Aurelius wrote about 2000 years ago:

We should remember that even Nature's inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why.
Or how ripe figs begin to burst.
And olives on the point of falling: the shadow of decay gives them a peculiar beauty.
Stalks of wheat bending under their own weight. The furrowed brow of the lion. Flecks of foam on the boar's mouth.

Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)

Awareness is noticing that her smile favors the right side of her face a bit more than the left.

It’s realizing that your dog has sat the exact same way since he was a puppy: lying prone with his right paw tucked under his chin and his elbow flared to the side.

It’s figuring out which people you feel anxious around, which foods make you bloated, and which parts of your day keep you sane.

Awareness is learning to be a better you.