A sideways glance

There are times when the world seems to speed up, and things that used to stay in the background suddenly rise to the surface. A pandemic, wars, economic crises, artificial intelligence: in a few years we have seen more change than our grandparents saw in a lifetime.

Paradoxically, this is the best moment to observe. When everything is moving, the mechanisms that drive us become easier to see.

Why “sideways”

We usually look at things in one of two ways. From above, like someone who already knows how things are, and judges. Or from below, like someone who feels small in front of something too big. Either way, we stay stuck where we are.

Here I will try another path: looking sideways, diagonally. Starting from something concrete, something I have lived or that we all see, and moving slowly down to the source: the fears, habits and automatic reactions underneath.

Knowing is not enough

Years of reading, courses and meetings have taught me one thing: knowledge on its own changes nobody. You can have read every book on awareness and still react the way you did ten years ago.

Change comes from experience, when you notice yourself while you are living, not afterwards.

Sometimes culture even becomes a cage. It hands us ideas already thought by others, ready-made patterns, and takes away the chance to see something new with our own eyes. This is not an invitation to stop reading. It is an invitation not to let what you know take the place of what you live.

The pact

So, before we begin, I ask you one thing. While you read, try to set aside for a moment your ideas, your loyalties, the positions you have already taken. Not to replace them with mine, but to see what happens when you are in no hurry to agree or disagree.

I know it is hard. Opinions snap into place on their own, like a reflex. But that is exactly where the work begins: noticing the reflex before you follow it.

What you will find here

One article a week. I will write about consciousness and thought, about how our reactions are born, about journeys and meetings, about questions that have no quick answer. Some pieces grow from notes I have carried with me for years, others from what is happening now, at book talks and workshops.

You won’t find final truths. You will find a fellow traveller asking questions alongside you.

Let’s begin. There is a lot to see.

Giampiero Bartolini Author of Nefino’s Journey and creator of the P.R.O.C.E.D.O.© Method