Nov. 2021 — A “Missing Piece” & Band-aids all the way down — Denver, CO, USA
There are certain pieces of our lives that are microcosms — that can show a stranger a disconcertingly accurate indicator of what matters to us, that serve as an outsized representation of who we are, how we live, and what we think about. Some of these include our schedules and our spending (Peter Drucker’s “show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value”), our possessions (“the things that we love tell us what we are” from Thomas Aquinas), our eating habits (a German philosopher’s “you are what you eat”), and our social circle (“you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”).
In Buddhism, there’s a concept called the four nutriments — four inputs that span the physical and the mental, that we take in constantly and contribute to our happiness or suffering. The first is food and drink, and the last two are more metaphysical (intention and consciousness). But the second is “sense impressions,” which means anything we take in through our senses — anything from glancing at billboards and reading ads in magazines to hearing the news or eavesdropping on a conversation.
On any given day, if I reflect on what I thought about or the directions my brain went without prompting, so much of it is influenced by those sense impressions —…
