re familiarity
Perhaps we turn inwards and not outwards and instead set ourselves to map the familiar with a degree of detail and precision we were previously unable to achieve, lacking the patience and the powers of concentration, attention and the fineness of discrimination. Lacking instruments delicate enough to register the slightest fluctuations and differences and the terminology to describe them. In doing so we re-enchant our own world, deepening rather than extending, more granularity rather than more size.
To map with ever more precision and justice the vast tracts of land and sea that fall between the poles, the temperate zones that never bend to the extremes, but partake of each in admixture, cold allayed with heat and will with swooning surrender. So that if we were to situate ourselves, in this instant, in this mild and everyday instant, and say
"Well, it is just an ordinary day, nothing out of the ordinary has happened or is expected to happen and I feel nothing out of the ordinary. All these sensations and their combinings are familiar and easily managed" - and yet, how much is occulted, concealed and ambiguous here. Why do the toes curl up, clenched with tense anticipation? And why is the breath so small in the lungs, and held between out and in for so very long each cycle? Why does the brow contract with concentration and why are the eyes fierce with focus? Why this level of arousal and vigilance? Why this degree of tension?
What interplay of stimuli and response, event and interpretation, projection and anticipation, fact and perception of fact? What are the component forces which combine and clash to comprise this moment, this balance of power that determines the shape and substance of this instant - always in the process, being always lopsided, of teetering and toppling into some other momentary form?