Just see.

The goal is to see reality. Or, to put it more succinctly, to see. Because if you're seeing, the only thing you can be seeing is reality. There ain't nothin' else there.

I read something (as usual, I forget where) that really struck a chord with me: our memories are not of our experiences, but of our opinions of our experiences.

I had some kind of weird flashback stuff going on during my three-day school. One session covered a disaster that occurred years after I was out of the news business. I didn't go anywhere near it. But the photos in the Powerpoint presentation were of scenes you'd see in any disaster, and they evoked a certain internal response - a response powerful enough that one of the instructors, who had known me in my reporting days, asked me if I was okay.

But get this: I wasn't responding to the pictures themselves, right? Because I wasn't even there when they were taken. I didn't have any memories of that event. I was responding to opinions and emotional attachments - both positive and negative - formed about some other event which, although it had some superficial similarity to what I was seeing, was actually completely unrelated to it.

So here's the photo of an event that I didn't cover, and bam! I'm reacting to some other event from ten years ago or longer... but even that's not really what I'm reacting to because that event reminds me of something else and bam! I'm thinking about some story where I felt like I had failed professionally and embarassed myself and bam! I'm thinking about being scolded by a producer or chewed out by a news director and how I felt about that and bam! I'm thinking about some snide thing my mother said to me when she was drunk and maybe there are a couple of more bam!s after that but they go so far back in time that I'm not remembering the reality, I'm not remembering the opinion of the reality, I'm only remembering some residual feeling I had about the opinion of the reality.

And now the color drains from my face and I start feeling a little queasy and this guy thinks I look a little sickly. (Well, I look a little sickly a great deal of the time - droopy, puffy eyelids and all that - but this was even moreso than usual.)

This story is a somewhat extreme (but true) example of something that happens to me - and most of us - all the time. We see something, but instead of directly experiencing it, letting it be exactly what it is, we throw it into the Cuisinart of our memories, attachments and opinions, whip it into a fresh, cool neurosis smoothie, and experience that instead.

It takes mindfulness to experience things directly, and leave the Cuisinart in the cabinet.

I frequently refer to the two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree because that was something I saw recently which I experienced directly. I wasn't thinking about some other squirrels I had seen when I was fifteen, or having an opinion about whether squirrels steal food from birds or pondering the concept that squirrels are really just rats with good p.r. -- there were two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree and what I saw was two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree and for about 45 seconds that was all I saw or experienced. I was totally there and I can tell it was pretty cool.

When you look at something, try just seeing what's there, without forming opinions or judgements or going back to stuff in the past.