Besides the early period in life before late adolescence when I was a young skull full of mush, there was a large chunk of my adulthood when I wasn’t aware enough to realize the value of paying attention and remaining self-aware. As an early adult, those concepts weren’t even in my vocabulary, much less objects of my concentration. But in the previous five to seven years of meditating and focusing more on the thoughts flowing through my mind, I’m amazed at how much I’ve changed since the beginning.

For instance, take apathy and the concept. The word itself used hold a negative connotation for me because I associated a lack of concern with the absence of power — as if I was supposed to be sensitive in any given situation to remain ready to act, so I could impose righteousness.

Yet it wasn’t until I more deeply considered the implication of such judgment — and better understood the ubiquity of suffering — that indifference made sense to me. And now I realize the assumptions built into passion: if I am inherently incidental, my choices must be, too. So is, I suppose, the connection between basis and action, if I choose to draw the conclusion. And that’s a long way from the automated assumptions of my youth. Before the “thinking” era in my life, I thought detachment was an indicator of a reduced humanity. Funny because today it is my goal, and I realize in retrospect that decisions inducing the greatest distance from others are the ones I remember the clearest. For that you might call me crazy, but I think of the growth through dissociation as a higher form of freedom.