In equinox week, the time when the whole year stands in perfect balance, I lost mine.

I was outside with the ducks, squatting down on the ground with them, helping dig for bugs. It’s a daily thing. I was about as low and stable as a person can get. You cannot fall off the earth. And that’s exactly when the world began to teeter like a slow seesaw, up and down, this way and that, as though someone had pulled the fulcrum out. It lasted three long full minutes. I kept holding the dirt so my body knew the ground was solid, and yet every other part of me was certain it wasn’t.

It was my first episode of something called BPPV, a little inner-ear disturbance, common enough, and I’m tending to it properly. But what I got once the tottering settled was that although the ground never moved, the instrument inside me that decides where “level” is tilted, and my whole reality tilted with it. It was the same field, the same ducks, but a completely different world.

I’ve been turning that over ever since, because it’s not only true of inner ears.

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Whatever you look at gets bigger and louder.

I’ve believed that for a very long time. Whatever you point your attention at grows. It gets bigger, louder, more real, and more solid. I don’t mean metaphorically, but in your actual lived experience of being alive.

And yet, the uncomfortable part, that we already know, is that most of us spend way too much time staring straight at what frightens and confuses us. I’m talking about the headlines, the economy, the thing that might go wrong, the diagnosis we’re bracing for, the conversation we’re dreading, the future we can’t quite see, and on and on.

And to a large extent, that’s working, even though we don’t want to admit it. We are, all of us, spectacularly good at the manifestation technique of feeding the thing we don’t want to, until it fills the whole screen. We think about, talk about, and look at something long enough and it does exactly what attention makes things do. It grows.

You can watch it happen in the world. A fear moves through the collective, everyone turns to look at it, and it swells louder, bigger, and more certain, fed by nothing but a few million pairs of eyes pointed in the same direction. 

And you can watch it happen in a single life, on your own sofa, anytime of the day, when one worry or headline or thought gets all your attention, and soon it’s the only thing in the room.

The sensor tilts. And the whole world tilts with it.

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I want to be careful here, because this idea gets cheapened constantly, and I know who I’m writing to. You’re too smart for the cheap version.

Here’s what I am NOT saying.  I’m not telling you to think positive. I’m not telling you the hard things aren’t real. 

They are. Fear is a valid emotion, and the ground under a lot of us is absolutely shifting. I’m not asking you to pretend, or bypass, or slap gratitude over grief and call it healing. That’s psychological and spiritual bypassing, and it’s just denial in nicer clothing. It also doesn’t work.

This is something else entirely.

There’s another current running underneath the loud one. It always has. It’s the current where joy and desire still grow, and where you remember who you were before you started bracing. 

Fewer people are feeding that one right now, because the loud current is so very loud. But it’s there. It’s running. And it doesn’t need you to deny a single difficult thing to turn toward it.

That’s because underneath a trauma story, or a fear, or armour, there’s a self that was never actually broken. It’s intact, and it’s always been intact. 

Frightening things happen, and they’re real, and yet that original self is still there, whole, beneath and beyond all of it, waiting to be remembered.

Most approaches start with the wound and work toward wholeness. But I’ve come to believe you can start the other way. You can reach the intact self first. You can remember it, feel it, and feed it, and then let the harder work happen downstream, from a place of already-remembered wholeness, instead of upstream, from a place of woundedness looking for repair.

It’s the same life and the same hard things, but a completely different starting point.

I promise you that’s not looking away from what’s real, but looking first at what’s also real. It’s been real all along, but just getting less of your attention.

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That said, I have an invitation to help you make that turn, not away from your life or reality as you know it, but toward the part of it that’s already living and alive. 

I’ve built a route for exactly this. It’s small, and it’s paced by you, and it starts with almost nothing but a shift in where you point your attention, and me alongside you while you do it.

So, if something in you leaned forward while reading this, and if you’re tired of feeding the loud current and you’d like to feed the other one, hit reply and send me the words “the other current” and I’ll write back with a short note and three questions to start you off. There’s no cost or catch. It’s just the first turn of your attention, pointed somewhere else that’s also real. 

Because what I know is that the ground isn’t actually moving. It never was. But you can change where you look and how you look. And when you do, the whole world tilts with it.

Wanna tilt it toward what’s alive?

Jonni

P.S. If you’ve been the one holding steady for everyone else while the world totters, I see you, and this is especially for you. The steadiest people are usually the most starved for their own joy. Press reply with “the other current,” and we’ll start there. 

P.P.S. For the record, the vertigo has settled. The doctor explained things. Turns out the fix is to move the little wayward crystals back where they belong. In other words, attention, pointed differently, made physical. Even my inner ear is on theme this week.