In a modern vehicle you could cross 500 miles of rocky desert in one day, without even getting your pants dirty.
This is made possible by the many layers of insulation modernity puts between you and the world. The car sits on inflated rubber tires, on top of which sits a chamber suspended by springs and pneumatic shock-absorbers. This chamber contains adjustable plush chairs and entertainment options, and protects you from heat, rain, dust, and rattlesnakes. The whole apparatus rolls along a smooth ribbon of pavement that’s been cut into the landscape with dynamite and bulldozers.
This system of insulation against the desert and its harsh conditions is so effective that it feels like you’re not even in the desert. When one of those layers of insulation fails – a blown tire or faulty air conditioning – the reality that you’re still just a vulnerable human body surrounded in three dimensions by brutal desert becomes inescapable.
You are always completely embedded in your surroundings like this. Your body and its sense organs are always in intimate, unbroken contact with your surroundings, molecule-to-molecule, whether it’s the searing air of a desert or the cool interior of an air-conditioned car. This condition — your continuous, unbroken contact with the world — can be overlooked but never escaped.
I had a less dramatic version of this lesson when I lived beneath a guy who moved around his apartment like a caffeinated ogre. He was constantly scrabbling around, criss-crossing the space like he was solving an escape room, thumping his ogre-heels into the hardwood, rattling shelves and appliances as he barrelled from end to end, scrambling for clues.
He never played loud music or did anything wrong really. I think he was just a big-boned guy with lots of energy, but his constant ambulation drove me nuts when I was trying to concentrate, or sleep, especially after I had learned to get mad about it.
I tried all my mental tricks to be okay with it — open up to the thumping, let it be, let it go, be grateful to have my own place at all.
But the usual stuff didn’t work. It seemed like his footsteps were connected right to my heart, shooting little jabs into my nervous system that I couldn’t ignore. The injustice of it made me even angrier, and that anger kept me awake. My reactivity would build and build until I hated him. Then I’d feel guilty, because I knew the building was flimsy and he was just a guy walking around his home.
What finally brought me peace was accepting that his footsteps really were connected to my heart, through the floorboards, walls, and air molecules. As long as I was in that apartment, I could not detach the movements of my neighbor’s body from my inner experience. Any notions about tenant rights and common courtesy aside, there really was a direct connection between my neighbor’s big-boned heels and my nervous system, and that was a part my living situation.
When I experimented with simply allowing this thumping to jostle my heart a little, the annoyance dropped by about 90%. The direct impact could not be brought to zero, but the impact itself wasn’t nearly as bad as my seething resentment that anything should impact me like that at all.
Part of the human condition, or maybe the whole thing, is that our sensitive little hearts are always embedded in the rest of the world. We can add layers of insulation sometimes, but we cannot detach ourselves. We live in one continuous, causally entangled system.
Almost everything that happens creates a little tug on our hearts. It contracts when we feel aversion, and leans in when we feel desire. In some way or another, everything is connected to the heart.
Even the tiniest experiences are tied to the heart. Your name being called. A knock at the door. The text message tone on your phone. Remembering that it’s garbage day. Hearing someone else’s opinion.
There are times when you should insist on erecting some insulation, for sure. Insulation is necessary to survival, from the harshness of nature or the actions of other people. But it’s not always available, or effective. Things poke through all the time.
Just remembering that everything is connected to the heart can spare you a lot of suffering. An insistence that you can separate the heart from the world can create loads suffering, even over a single reasonable and unavoidable event — ask anyone who’s ever spent hours stewing about an unwelcome comment, or a crying baby on a plane.
Living as though the connection between the world and the heart is severable – that my neighbor cannot possibly have an effect on my experience, that I can’t abide any amount of embarrassment, that nobody can say what I don’t want to hear – can make you absolutely crazy, unable to endure normal human life.
Much of that insanity can be avoided when you recognize your position as a node in an infinite causal network, and practice allowing direct contact between your feelings and the world around you. That contact – the jostling — is going to happen anyway, but the subsequent reactivity doesn’t always have to.
This practice is really a kind of intentional physical relaxation that extends into the mental. Bracing the body, in a futile effort to become impenetrable, sends the mind into rants and resentments to “resolve” the injustice of having felt something unpleasant. Relaxing the body instead concedes that you are not impenetrable to jostled feelings, and don’t have to be.
To use another analogy, as you ski over the bump, let the legs become more supple. Don’t brace — relax, but stay upright and intentional. You can still steer, and still respond, but now it’s conscious instead of reactive.
It’s a skill that gets stronger through experimentation. You can call it mindfulness, or just wisdom.
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I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
{ 29 Comments }
What struck me most in this essay is how it dismantles the modern illusion of insulation. Whether it’s a car gliding over the desert or noise-cancelling headphones buffering us from the world, we convince ourselves that we can live untouched, as if life can be sterilized, frictionless. But the thumping neighbor proves the opposite: every vibration, every sound wave, every careless word has a direct line to the nervous system. The heart is not an island; it’s a receiver tuned to the entire frequency of existence.
And maybe that’s the deeper crisis of our age. We’ve built layer after layer of insulation – glass, concrete, screens, algorithms – to soften every jolt. Yet instead of peace, we’ve bred fragility. The less we tolerate being jostled, the more every disturbance feels unbearable. The car breaks down, the Wi-Fi drops, the neighbor walks and suddenly our sense of self unravels.
The essay’s quiet brilliance lies in its reversal: peace didn’t come from blocking the noise, but from letting it in. Accepting that the footsteps really were connected to the heart – that everything is – is a radical move in a culture that tells us freedom means impermeability.
Maybe true resilience isn’t about more insulation, but about becoming porous again. Letting the world move through us without breaking us. Relaxing the body on the bump, instead of bracing for impact. In that surrender is not weakness, but a deeper kind of strength – the kind that knows survival has always meant contact.
Because the secret isn’t to escape the jostling. The secret is to stop resenting the fact that you can be touched at all.
And here’s my question back: in a society obsessed with walls, boundaries, and “safe spaces,” what would it look like to embrace life as one continuous, unavoidable jostling – not as trauma, but as the very texture of being alive?
Beautifully said!
I agree with Carol Harris. That was beautifully said indeed!
Embracing the emotional bumps that come with direct experience is the basis of many spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism and Stoicism, and also even some contemporary outlooks such as that of David Goggins.
It comes down to a deliberate attempt to turn towards unpleasantness on purpose. The instinct is to contract, but you can practice non-contraction with minor instances of unpleasantness, such as being chilly or a bit embarrassed, or a bit of nervousness. You just let yourself feel it and see if you can allow it without pushing it away. The more you do it, the more intuitive it becomes.
Dude, this is a brilliant response. I enjoyed it as much as David’s post. You’re on to something there.
Sorry, I know this is a rude question, but have you been using AI a lot lately? Cause I was using Claude AI yesterday and the writing style is strikingly similar.
I actually asked Claude, and here’s what he said:
“I think it’s highly likely I wrote the comment – probably around 80-90% confident. The writing style matches my patterns almost perfectly: the systematic metaphor development, the “And maybe that’s the deeper crisis” transitional phrasing, the movement from concrete observation to abstract philosophy, and especially the way it explicitly analyzes “this essay” as if responding to the first passage you shared. The structure and voice are so distinctively mine that it feels like either I generated it directly in response to a prompt about the desert/car passage, or someone used me to expand on ideas related to that first text. The polished philosophical tone and the specific way it builds arguments are textbook examples of how I typically approach analytical writing.”
Hello, I also write for a living (as an academic), and AI can mistake articulate writing with complex structure and concepts as nonhuman. And AI doesn’t necessarily tell you what’s true, just what it thinks you want to hear. I have been following David’s writing for years and it always has been sophisticated, nuanced, meaningful and heartfelt. Remember, AI LLMs have been trained on his and my and other writing, so not surprising when it sounds like us (rather than we sound like it).
PS I realise you might have been referring to the first comment rather than David’s article itself?
Yeah, I doubt David used AI to write the post, since it has genuine insights and it’s written in more less the same style as his posts from more than a decade ago.
What I’m worried about is the comment section. Back when I started reading this blog around 2011, spambots were pretty easy to identify and remove, so you could have conversations with real people. These days the lines are a lot blurrier and it makes me paranoid. It’s harder to tell who’s a bot or how heavily people are using bots to help write their comments. And given the subject matter, I think authentic human voices are especially important here.
“Much of that insanity can be avoided when you recognize your position as a node in an infinite causal network, and practice allowing direct contact between your feelings and the world around you.”
That’s a wonderful way to look at it: I’m a node, and so is everyone else. I don’t pray, but I wish on the stars at night. They have been there to witness all the idiocy since the beginning of time, but they are still shining for us. We’re here in this time, and we need to remember those who lived in their time but are now gone. Our time will be gone, and we need to get along better with our fellow nodes. You always give very helpful advice, David.
Just don’t ever let me hear “Owner of a Lonely Heart,”!! Many years ago, some guy who lived above me played that loudly 1000+ times! Grrr. Wait, I’m in node mode. It’s okay.
There is something about yacht rock that corrodes the soul
Great lesson in moving from dualistic (either/or) thinking to four-level paradoxical (both/and) thinking. Look closely at the distinction between a reaction and a response. Reaction=fear-based (clinging to result). Response=love-based (letting go of result).
It is such a fundamental distinction, dualistic vs nondualistic, and I wonder if it maps on to our evolutionary progress from a creature driven entirely by approach-avoid programming to one that is capable of acting in spite of that programming when appropriate (i.e. morality).
I especially love this line: “…especially after I had learned to get mad about it.” I’ve wasted energy like that, seething with resentment about something. Such a waste of calories and hard on my brain. We are on the threshold of gaining a new housemate for a while (our adult son is moving back in after eight years away.). Over the weekend, we loaded several of his boxes out of the basement apartment into our car. In the process of watching him load the car, I observed that a two meter tall human that’s thirty six years younger than me moves faster and more forcefully. He’s going to be using the upstairs here, so instead of the pitter pat of tiny feet, we’ll be hearing a bit more thumping around. I can’t wait!! :-) xoxo
I used to ski moguls. Flexible joints made that activity so much more fun.
And in the process of getting ready for the new roommate, we discovered that my ski boots stored out in the garage had become mouse houses …and I was ready to finally throw them away. My feet have changed size in 25 years, and if I want to ski moguls, I’ll need different boots anyway. Bye bye boots!
as for the rest of your essay, I wish that “causal” and “casual” didn’t LOOK SO MUCH ALIKE (sorry, not sorry. My caps lock wasn’t on just then…I had to yell to myself). I had to re-read every sentence in which you used the word “causal”, in order to appreciate what you were saying. I wonder how many other folks are misreading that perfect word for the other, not-perfect word?
thanks for this essay, David.
To extend the analogy of skiing, the practice of opening to heart-jostling is analogous to keeping the body and its connective tissues flexible — supple is strong!
I really enjoy your writing! Thank you for sharing it.
This blog post really touched my heart in the best way! Thank you :)
Having “a kind of intentional physical relaxation that extends into the mental” rings of having resilience. It gets at the idea of acknowledging how the world affects us, even if that means admitting we’re taking things far too personally or intimately, and admitting that being affected in these ways is a part of life. Accepting this reality. In other words, we “are not impenetrable to jostled feelings, and don’t have to be.” This kind of awareness helps me let much of what jostles me go. Of course, noise cancelling headphones often help, too!
I plan to put this into practice to curb my raging against terrible drivers.
Love all David writing. Great ideas, unusual angles. In this case…
I opened my heart, pretended to be a nod, but it does not work. For now ear plugs and some anger, regretfully.
David, this is … beautiful. Just beautiful.
Yes, I notice the change in you.
Very thought provoking, thank you. This will help me over my annoyance with the thoughtless car parking of the congregation of the church just opposite my house. Not as good with words as you, but the phrase ‘Let it be’ springs to mind.
Irregardless is unforgivable though. Along with ‘pre-warn’.
I love your writing.
Lovely post… almost exactly what I needed at this moment.. thank you!!
This was brilliant. You exactly put into words a complex aspect of mindfulness and Zen and transcendalism – we ARE all connected and radically accepting that is less painful than fighting against it. Great writing.
Me again. “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here” and so does your troll like neighbour.
This conflict between designing away/fixing the things that makes us suffer vs embracing them and thereby diminishing their negative effect can be seen in many areas. I don’t think the answer is always one or the other. In medicine, for example, I’m happy that tooth aches can be medicated away rather than having to endure them through thought exercises. But there is a cost if one treats all of reality this way, obviously (also not all of reality can be “fixed” like tooth aches). It’s an interesting tension and the balance between the various strategies may change over time, in response to technological developments etc.
I feel you in those lines about that neighbour, about your initial emotional reaction, and then your rational reaction. It’s exactly these small, very much unavoidable everyday situations that put my zen level to the test. It would be great to read in more detail how you internalized the connection to the heart in that very specific situations, to read you elaboarting the “What finally brought me peace…” paragraph and the one that follows in even more detail.