Imagine waking up one morning with no personal memory.
You still know how to walk, talk, eat, drive, use your phone. Your body remembers. Your practical knowledge is intact.
But you don’t remember your story.
You don’t remember yesterday. You don’t remember where you’ve been, who you know, what you’ve done, or what you were thinking about last night.
You have your abilities.
You have your body.
But you have no personal history.
For a while, everything would have a quality of newness.
You wouldn’t be looking at the world through everything you already knew about it.
You would simply be meeting it.
Now take the experiment much deeper.
You don’t have to lose your memory.
Just imagine that, for the instant before you meet any moment, you have no memory.
Nothing from the past is brought forward.
No picture of what this moment is supposed to be.
No expectation of what comes next.
And then—
meet it.
Try this
Try it right after you finish reading this, or sometime later today.
For just a few seconds, let your eyes blink naturally.
Imagine that each blink opens a new door.
A new glimpse.
A new moment.
Just notice what happens.
I have been thinking about this in relation to Sketch Stretching.
The first sketch that comes to mind is simply a hand on a doorknob, just before turning it and pulling the door open.
You don’t know what’s on the other side.
The door opens.
And then another moment appears.
And another.
Each moment is like another door opening.
It reminds me of the old-fashioned way of making animation: a series of still sketches, each one slightly different from the one before it. Flip through them quickly and the separate sketches become a continuous flow of movement.
Perhaps that’s something like our experience.
Each moment is a partial sketch.
Awareness notices.
Connections form.
Feelings arise.
The next moment arrives.
Another sketch.
Another opening.
And the movie continues.
But perhaps it’s more than watching a movie.
It’s like watching the movie of you as it is happening.
The plot isn’t already written.
It is unfolding through the connections, feelings, movements, and choices of each moment.
You don’t know the next scene because you haven’t lived it yet.
The door keeps opening.
This is where I am beginning to use another word:
sketchful.
Mindful awareness can be simply noticing what is happening.
Sketchful awareness adds something.
It has the capacity to form a mental sketch of the connections and feelings that are flowing through the moment.
Not necessarily a picture.
Not necessarily words.
More like an emerging sense of the whole:
open … light … relaxed … adventurous … vibrating … poised.
The moment is not being analyzed.
It is being experienced—and sketched from within.
And perhaps this is why a familiar place can suddenly feel new.
We don’t necessarily need a new place.
We may need a new way of meeting the place we’re already in.
Memory tells us, I’ve been here before.
But this particular moment has never happened before.
The door is opening again.
So perhaps the practice is not to stop the movie.
It’s to become more alive to its unfolding.
To watch the movie of you—not as something that has already been made, but as something being created moment by moment.
And maybe that is what sketchfulness is:
Meeting each moment before memory has finished telling us what it is.
Fire.
Ready.
Aim.
And then—
the next door opens.
Want to go further?
Join me for a free one-hour Zoom experience where we’ll explore Sketch Stretching together.
The Way Happiness Happens
An experiential meditation practice for opening to the moment, dissolving what gets in the way, and discovering greater happiness.
We’ll explore Sketch Stretching as a simple experiential meditation practice—a way of moving from thinking about an experience to actually experiencing it.
You don’t need to know how to draw.
You don’t need meditation experience.
And you don’t need to know what you’re going to discover.
Just bring paper, something to draw with, and your curiosity.
Free · One hour · Zoom · 10:00 AM Eastern
Monday August 17, 24, 31, September 14
Registration closes at 5:00 PM the evening before.
Register with mida47@aol.com
Come catch a fish.
See what you discover.
And decide how far you want to stretch.
Spiritual Gravity 