Some time ago, I decided to sign up for a consultation regarding a personal issue of mine. I was given an appointment about two months later. I wasn’t in a hurry, so I agreed. As the date approached, the meeting was postponed by two weeks. When the day finally came, I received a call informing me that the appointment was being moved an hour and a half earlier. On site, I had to wait nearly 40 minutes before the consultation began. After it was over, it turned out that the next one could take place no sooner than a month and a half later, though it was unclear exactly when. Okay, nothing urgent.

At the same time, however, other postponements and cancellations were happening as well. Again, nothing important, nothing urgent — but still, this accumulation of delays and minor inconveniences struck me as irritating.

This led me to wonder what kind of signals these layered events send to the brain, or to the subconscious, so to speak. Somehow, doesn’t this disrupt our perception — our sense of life flowing smoothly? Doesn’t it “fragment” the functioning of consciousness, throw it out of rhythm and out of sync with the environment and with ourselves? Isn’t there a risk that this tunes us to a certain wavelength, so that we ourselves, unconsciously, begin to provoke similar processes in our daily lives? Don’t such experiences and accumulations of “non-happenings” hinder and block us?

We know that the brain seems to dislike working in a mode of constant interruption and changing rules — something anyone who has had their work repeatedly interrupted by new “urgent” tasks has experienced. And when we expect something and it doesn’t happen for reasons beyond our control, and shortly after that — surprise — something else also doesn’t happen, the scenarios in our consciousness become fragmented in a similar way, because in those scenarios the events have already occurred. Thus, the inner reflection of life in our consciousness takes on a fragmented form, and from there, most likely, so do our thinking and behavior.

Life flows best when things are in rhythm and harmony. The question then is: how do we integrate disruptions in the rhythm of our lives into a broader inner rhythm of emotional calm? How do we build such a rhythm? Perhaps philosophers, yogis, and Zen Buddhists can answer that question.

*image created with help from Chat GPT