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The Small Vanishings

What makes this hard to catch is that the disappearance is rarely dramatic. You are standing at the sink, doing the most unimpressive task in human history, and then suddenly you are no longer there. The hand is still moving. The toothbrush is still doing its little prison scrub. But inwardly you are in a courtroom, or an old conversation, or a fantasy where everyone finally understands your brilliance and regrets their previous stupidity. Attention has been hijacked, and because this happens all day long, the mind treats it as normal.

That is part of the problem. We think wandering is harmless because it is common. We think because everyone lives like a haunted Roomba, bumping from task to task while mentally elsewhere, that this must simply be what a human mind does. But the deeper traditions have always said no. This is not freedom. This is sleep with errands.

How Attention Gets Stolen

Helminski’s point is not merely that attention wanders. It is that attention gets captured by what attracts or repels us, and the ego then mistakes this reactivity for choice. That means the issue is not just distraction in the generic sense. The issue is that our attention is usually moved by appetite, irritation, fantasy, fear, vanity, and unfinished inner theater. Something in us is always ready to lunge.

You see this in embarrassingly ordinary places. You are running errands and somebody cuts you off in the parking lot. Now the body is in one place, but inwardly you are writing a thesis on the collapse of civilization. Or you are folding laundry and suddenly remembering an insult from three years ago with the emotional freshness of a live broadcast. Or you are brushing your teeth and by the fourth tooth you are no longer in the bathroom at all. You are in some imaginary future where you have finally explained yourself correctly.

The mind is a talented escape artist. Give it a sink and it will build a portal.

The Witness Does Not Scream

The good news is that the inner witness does not need to arrive as some heroic spiritual personality. It does not need robes. It does not need incense. It does not need a soundtrack that sounds like monks mating with synthesizers. It begins much more quietly than that.

It begins the moment you notice.

That is all.

Not fixing. Not scolding. Not launching a self-improvement campaign because you have once again failed to remain luminously present while buying toothpaste. Just noticing. “Ah. I’m gone.” That moment matters because the instant you see the wandering, you are no longer completely fused with it. Something in you has stepped half an inch back. That half inch is sacred territory.

Why Gentleness Matters

Most people ruin the practice right there by turning the witness into a hall monitor. They notice they are gone and immediately begin the familiar inner sermon. “Why am I like this? Why can’t I stay present? I should be better at this by now.” Which is just another form of leaving. Now you are no longer lost in fantasy or irritation. You are lost in self-judgment. Same building. Different room.

The witness is not a critic. It is a simple, steady seeing. It does not panic when attention slips. It does not make your wandering into evidence for the prosecution. It just notices, and then invites a return. Very gently. The whole movement is closer to turning your face back toward the moment than it is to beating yourself into compliance.

That matters because harshness is still ego. It still believes force is the answer. Presence usually grows better in honesty than in violence.

Ordinary Life Is the Training Ground

This is why the real practice does not happen only in formally spiritual moments. It happens while brushing your teeth, yes, but also while walking into the post office, waiting at a red light, listening to somebody tell a long story when your personality would strongly prefer to flee the country, and standing in line while every cell in your body demands stimulation.

These ordinary moments are not a distraction from the work. They are the work.

The kitchen is where you find out whether attention can stay put without being bribed. The grocery store is where you discover whether your peace depends on no one being annoying. The commute is where you learn whether your interior life belongs to presence or to grievance. The little vanishings of the day are not proof that you are failing. They are where the mechanism becomes visible.

And once it becomes visible, it can no longer run the whole monastery unchecked.

Catching Yourself in the Act

What starts to change over time is not that you never disappear. It is that you begin to catch the movement sooner. At first, you notice three minutes later that you have been lost in some fantasy argument while loading the dishwasher. Then maybe thirty seconds later. Then in the middle of the spiral itself. Then, once in a while, right at the moment attention starts to slip toward the back door.

That is not a small thing. That is the strengthening of inner life.

Because the point is not to create some rigid state where you never drift, never react, never lose the thread. The point is to build familiarity with the one in you that can notice without collapsing. The one that can return. The one that can remain a little more stable while the rest of you performs its usual vaudeville.

Coming Back Without Romance

There is nothing glamorous about this. Nobody gets to post a mystical selfie because they returned to the present while standing in line at Walgreens. This is deeply unsexy work. Which is probably one reason it is real.

But over time, this simple practice of noticing and returning begins to do something substantial. It weakens the automatic trance. It gives the witness more substance. It teaches attention that it does not have to obey every impulse, every irritation, every fantasy with a megaphone. It lets you inhabit the ordinary without constantly fleeing it.

And then once in a while, in the middle of something completely unimpressive, you are just there. Really there. Not performing presence. Not narrating it. Not being pleased with yourself for having achieved it.

Just there.

Which turns out to be a far greater miracle than most of us were trained to look for.


Virgin Monk Boy

Good stuff.

Sometimes I'm out on a long solo bike ride, the wind is in my teeth, it's hard work.
I let my mind wander off and the pain in the legs is more bearable.
This seems like the opposite of mindfulness.
I'll think on this next time I'm out alone.

Sometimes I'm out on a long solo bike ride, the wind is in my teeth, it's hard work.
I let my mind wander off and the pain in the legs is more bearable.
This seems like the opposite of mindfulness.
I'll think on this next time I'm out alone.

I’ve biked thousands of long distance miles. Not so much anymore, but I can relate to what you’re saying.

Decades ago, I biked across the country. On one miserable day in the desolate sandhills of Nebraska, the wind was straight in my face, blowing about 20 mph, the temperature hovered between 40-45, and it was still 50 miles to Valentine.

I didn’t have a cyclometer- just a hand drawn spreadsheet encased in plastic that cross-referenced pedal revolutions per minute with the number of inches in each of my ten gears that yielded speed in miles per hour..

My normal, cross country pedal revolutions were about 80. At first, you simply count them, but after awhile you just know.

In any event, on that particular day, the wind had me down to almost my lowest gear and I could see by my chart I was traveling about 6 miles per hour.

Great…… I would’t be in
Valentine for another 8 hours.

But my next thought was…… good! If I just focus on rpms, I’ll be there in 8 hours, and it will still give me a couple of hours before dark.

So that’s what I did. I focused on a steady cadence and the process soon became automatic. I almost didn’t have to think about it. The “what ifs”…. “What if this happens?” Or “What if that happens?” faded into the background.


It was just me and the cadence. And when I slipped into that state of mind, the fatigue, which remained, took second fiddle to the landscape of the Niobrara River bottom land, the stark, beautiful landscape of grass covered hills that rolled past- herd of cattle by fencepost by abandoned barn, by milepost…until there were trees on the outskirts of town and the road dipped and dropped into Valentine.

Almost 50 years ago, that trip taught me a lot about limits, stark beauty, relying on myself (and others!), and mindfulness.

Didn’t even know the word “mindfulness” back then- but that’s what it was- not the daydreams when the sun was shining, but the attention to what was going on in my life, moment by moment.

And yet, it’s one of those things that I did and really don’t spend alot of time thinking about.

But the lessons are still with me.

I believe we’ve all had experiences like that.

Bicycles are great teachers in that respect

the desolate sandhills of Nebraska

I lived in western Nebraska for a few years. The Sandhills were one of my favorite places in Nebraska. The Ogallala aquifer is at the surface in the depressions in the dunes and it creates many small lakes and ponds amid the sandhills. A very interesting environment.

I lived in western Nebraska for a few years. The Sandhills were one of my favorite places in Nebraska. The Ogallala aquifer is at the surface in the depressions in the dunes and it creates many small lakes and ponds amid the sandhills. A very interesting environment.

Very interesting indeed! Before I travelled through them, the term "sandhills" had me believing "dry" and "dusty", but as you say, that is not the case.

Cherry County is the largest county in the United States- it's huge and took me two days to get across it.

OK.... now you've got me in a state of reverie, and it's the furthest thing from "mindfulness", but still.... memories flood in.

About the day (the day after the events in my previous post)... as I was riding from Valentine west to the town of Merriman.

Still in the sandhills..... my back tire went flat.

So there I was, starting a routine that I seemed to be repeating every few hundred miles. I released my rear wheel, laid my bike on its side, pulled out my repair kit and sat by the side of the road, miles from nowhere, pried off my tire from the rim and began to repair my inner tube.

Five minutes went by.... not another vehicle on the road it seemed. The only sound was the wind blowing through the grasses.

And then I heard it.... the sound of a vehicle approaching- coming from the direction I had come, and headed west. My back was facing in the direction of the vehicle, so I didn't see it, but I heard the engine slowing, and after a bit, I heard the crunch of gravel as it moved onto the shoulder and came to a stop about fifty yards behind me.

The door opened.... I turned around.... and there, getting out of the Chevy Blazer, was a guy dressed completely in black.... black Stetson, black Levis, black Tony Lama boots, sunglasses and a black shirt.. with a white clerical collar. A priest.

"Episcopalian." I asked?

"Hell no, boy," Roman Catholic.

And that is how I met Father John.

Could he help, he asked?

"No thanks," I said, for in truth, I was just then getting ready to put the repaired wheel back on my bike. But I asked him how far it was to the next town, a little berg named Cody, because it was getting close to lunchtime and I was thinking mightily about food.

He guessed my intention, because then he mentioned a cafe in the town and said he was headed that way because they had the best banana cream pie in the county, and I told him I'd meet him there for lunch.

He returned to the Chevy Blazer and drove off. I got on my bike and rode the five miles to Cody and found him sitting in the cafe.

We shared a wonderful lunch (with slices of banana cream pie). I told him I was a recent seminary grad on a two month bicycle trip- headed to the Tetons, then south and back east to Oklahoma for my first parish. And he told me about himself- a former commodities trader in Chicago (which is where I went to seminary).

A native American, he went off to Catholic seminary, entered the priesthood and now was the priest assigned to the entirety of Cherry County- a ministry field so vast that he kept blankets in the back of his Blazer in case he got stuck in a snowstorm going from church to church.

Looking at me rather intently, he said "You know.... it's still not too late in the year to get some really bad weather (it was the very end of April).

We talked for an hour or so, and it was finally time to leave. He had places to go, and I wanted to get back on the road. We walked outside. I unlocked my bike from the post. He got in his Blazer. His engine was running when I pulled up alongside him.

"How far is it to Merriman." I asked?

"24 miles... at mile marker 98. Watch those mile markers, white boy, or you're gonna die!"

Then he laughted and that was the last I saw of Father John.

Great posts, wzambon.

I've done some multi-day bike tours. Hope to do a lot more as the kids fly the nest and I transition into retirement.
Black Hills this year. A cross-country trip is on the bucket list.

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