Ink of the Day š« Deep Reflection: Encounter with the Unhurried | On Pace, Presence, and the Refusal of Optimization š #WritingCulture
Why Awareness Doesnāt Save Us from Ourselves
We live at speeds we did not choose. The world accelerates, and we accelerate with it, mistaking velocity for vitality, confusing motion with meaning. Yet what happens when we encounter a being that refuses this logic entirely? The sea turtle does not hurry. It will not perform transformation on your timeline. It moves with a rhythm so ancient and indifferent that our urgency becomes visible as the anxious construction it always was. Or so we tell ourselves, already turning the turtle into lesson before we have even entered the water.
This morning, anchored at Dihamri Marine Protected Area, Socotra (12Ā°36.00ā² N, 54Ā°11.80ā² E), I slip into water so clear it feels like absence rather than medium. The coral gardens spread below, and within minutes a green sea turtle glides into view. Large, unhurried, utterly self-contained. I begin to follow, matching my breathing to its pace, trying to stay close without crowding. The turtle moves with deliberate strokes, pausing to graze on algae, ascending occasionally to breathe. It does not acknowledge my presence. It does not speed up or slow down for my curiosity. It simply continues, and I realize with growing discomfort that maintaining this proximity requires surrendering my own rhythm entirely.
My fins want to kick harder, to close the distance when it drifts ahead. My breath wants to surface more frequently than the turtleās longer intervals permit. Every few minutes I find myself adjusting, recalibrating, working to match a pace the turtle inhabits effortlessly. Something reveals itself in that work: I am accustomed to setting tempo. In contemplation, in supposed stillness, I determine how long to sit, when to move, what constitutes sufficient depth. The turtle offers no such negotiation. Its rhythm is not a suggestion I can modify. To follow is to submit, and submission exposes how rarely I allow anything outside myself to determine pace.
But as I form this insight, as I catch myself recognizing my need for control, something more uncomfortable surfaces: I am already building narrative. The turtle is becoming metaphor. Its indifference is being converted into teaching. I tell myself I am learning that not everything exists to teach me, yet that very recognition becomes the lesson I extract. The turtleās refusal to mean anything is being transformed into meaning. I have turned its indifference into a meditation on indifference, which means I have violated what I claim to honor by making it serve my contemplative practice.
Culturally, we have made optimization a moral virtue. To move efficiently, to maximize output, to compress experience into digestible intervals: these are the currencies of contemporary life. We measure meditation in minutes, workouts in heart-rate zones, even rest in terms of recovery metrics. But perhaps the deeper pathology is not optimization itself but our sophisticated resistance to it. We congratulate ourselves for recognizing the violence of urgency, for valuing slowness, for honoring what refuses to be used. Yet this very honoring appropriates. The sea turtle becomes proof of our evolved consciousness, evidence that we are the kind of person who can appreciate what does not perform for us. Our critique of appropriation becomes another form of it, just with better aesthetics.
What if the discomfort I feel trying to match the turtleās rhythm is not revelation but theater? I tell myself I am discovering my addiction to control, but perhaps I am performing the discovery, staging an encounter with my own urgency so I can narrate its recognition. The turtle does not need my witness, I think, congratulating myself for understanding this. But the congratulation reveals the trap: I have made the turtleās indifference into an achievement of my awareness. My acknowledgment that the encounter is asymmetrical becomes a way of centering myself in the story. The turtle remains colonized, just in more philosophically respectable ways.
Perhaps this is the actual violence: not that we impose meaning on what resists it, but that we cannot stop imposing meaning when we recognize the imposition. Our very sophistication about projection becomes another layer of projection. I follow the turtle and think, I should not need this to mean something. But that thought itself needs the turtle to validate my evolved relationship to meaning-making. The turtle was never outside my narrative. It was conscripted into my contemplative practice the moment I decided to follow it, and my subsequent recognition of this conscription does not liberate the turtle. It just makes me feel more aware while doing exactly the same thing.
The turtle surfaces for breath and I surface with it. For a moment we float together, both drawing air, both suspended between depths. Then it dives again, slow and certain, and I follow until my own lungs demand return. I watch it continue into darker water, moving at exactly the pace it moved when I was present. And here the most uncomfortable recognition arrives: this observation itself, the turtle continues unchanged by my presence, is not humility but its opposite. I am still the one narrating, still the consciousness that determines what the encounter means. The turtleās indifference teaches me nothing. I am extracting teaching from indifference, and my awareness of this does not stop me. It just allows me to extract while feeling sophisticated about the process.
Reflection
Back on the boat, salt drying on my skin, I face a question I cannot answer: Is there any form of human encounter that does not appropriate what it touches? Or are we condemned to make everything mean, trapped in narrative even when we recognize the trap?
The turtle did not teach me to slow down. It did not reveal my urgency. It simply existed, and I followed it while building stories about what that following revealed. Those stories say more about my need for encounters to yield insight than they say about the turtle. Recognizing this does not free me from the need. I am still writing. The turtle still serves my narrative. My awareness of this fact has become the latest thing I am trying to understand, the latest meaning I am extracting from an encounter that offered none.
Perhaps what unsettles most is not the appropriation itself but the recognition that sophistication about appropriation changes nothing. I can see myself colonizing the turtleās indifference, can name the violence of turning it into metaphor, can acknowledge that even this acknowledgment continues the violation. None of this awareness alters what I do. The contemplative practice I have built, the intellectual tools I employ, the very capacity for self-reflection I value: all of these ensure that nothing remains outside my need to understand it. The turtle swims in water. I swim in meaning-making. And there is no shore where these waters separate.
What remains is not wisdom but the uncomfortable acknowledgment that we are constitutionally incapable of leaving things alone. The human condition may be precisely this: we cannot encounter without extracting, cannot witness without narrating, cannot recognize our appropriation without making that recognition into another form of appropriation. The turtle is indifferent to all of this. It continues at its pace, utterly unburdened by the narratives I construct around it. That indifference may be the only thing that remains untouched, not because I have learned to honor it, but because it lives beyond the reach of my most sophisticated awareness.
A quiet gratitude š to the green sea turtle that remains utterly indifferent to this reflection, reminding me of nothing because it does not speak the language of reminders, and to all who have tried to honor what refuses to be honored, discovering that the honoring itself was another form of appropriation, and that recognizing this changes nothing except the sophistication of our self-regard.
ā#WritingCultureā by Ellis Zeitmann @ ThinkZeit
#WritingCulture #InkOfTheDay #ExistentialThinking #GoingOnBeing #PhilosophyOfLife