Have you ever noticed how entertained by a seemingly simple thing a baby can be? Make a funny face or dangle a brightly colored object in their direction and watch what happens. The whole world stops. Their eyes go wide, their whole body responds, and for that moment they are completely, utterly, gloriously here, with no opinion about it, no history with it, and no agenda about where it should go next.
They aren’t thinking, *I preferred the face she made last Tuesday.* They aren’t worried the toy might eventually be taken away. They are just here, fully present, genuinely entertained by existence itself.
We were all that baby once.
Somewhere along the way, something changed.
We got taught, steadily and with good intentions, that some things were good and some things were less so. We learned to want more of the good and push away the rest. We learned that we, specifically we, had preferences worth protecting, and that protecting them was a kind of self-care.
And just like that, the ego moved in.
It arrived the way furniture arrives in an empty room, one piece at a time, until suddenly you can’t remember what the room looked like before. The ego brought two things with it, and it never travels without them. The first is craving, that quiet insistence of *keep this, I need this, don’t let this change.* The second is aversion, the reflexive pulling away from anything that doesn’t fit the preferred picture. Between those two companions, most human suffering quietly takes up residence.
Here is what the Buddha noticed, and what you can notice too on an ordinary afternoon if you sit still long enough: the suffering isn’t actually in the thing you want or the thing you’re avoiding. It lives in the clinging itself, in the part of you that has decided the way things are right now must be preserved or escaped. The moment you grip, you suffer, and the suffering arrives precisely because life moves while you are holding on.
The ego is the one doing the gripping.
This is usually where people get nervous, and the concern is worth taking seriously.
*If I let go of my ego, what’s left? Will I just float away, stop caring about anything, become some hollow, blissed-out person who smiles too much and can’t make a decision?*
The honest answer is that releasing the ego isn’t losing yourself. It is setting down the part of yourself that is exhausting to carry, the part that monitors how you’re being perceived, replays conversations looking for slights, and can’t fully enjoy Tuesday because it’s too busy negotiating with Wednesday. What rises when that settles is something steadier and, strangely, more authentically you than the ego ever was.
That steadiness is called equanimity, and it is worth distinguishing from numbness. Equanimity is the presence of calm beneath feeling, which means you can be moved without being swept away, care deeply without clinging desperately, and show up fully to your life without needing everything to go your way. It is presence, not absence, and it feels like coming home to a room you forgot you loved.
There is a concept in Zen called beginner’s mind, and it means approaching your life, your relationships, your ordinary Wednesday, with the same open curiosity as someone encountering it for the very first time. It isn’t about pretending you have no experience or playing naive. It is about releasing the part of you that already knows how this goes and has therefore stopped really looking.
The beginner’s mind is the baby’s mind, and it is available to you right now, not as something to achieve but as something to return to. You lived there once. You know the address.
Yesterday, my husband Larry and I were driving to Boise and we decided to try something simple. We sat in silence and watched the landscape pass, with a single quiet agreement between us: no narrating, no naming, no judging. When a cow appeared on a hillside in an improbably precarious position, we let ourselves pretend we didn’t quite know what we were seeing. We received it as shape and movement, color and angle, and at times we even released color from the vocabulary, letting the world arrive as pure form.
What surprised us was how insistent the mind was about its job. It wanted to name everything, file everything, assign everything a value. *That’s beautiful. That’s lonely looking. I wonder how far we’ve gone.* The ego was tireless in its commentary, always ready with a preference, always reaching for the label that would make the experience make sense.
And in the pauses between those reaches, something quieter was there.
If you’d like to try this yourself, it doesn’t require a road trip. A walk will do, or a few minutes in a room you know well. The invitation is to look at something ordinary as though you have no word for it, no history with it, no opinion about it yet. See what the mind does when you give it that kind of freedom. Offer yourself grace when it immediately starts narrating again, because it will, and that’s fine. The practice isn’t in achieving silence. The practice is in noticing the narration, gently, without judgment, which is itself a small act of beginner’s mind.
The ego will tell you that all of this is impractical, that the world requires someone in there managing things, building the narrative, keeping score. And perhaps, for some things and in some moments, it has its uses.
But it was never meant to run everything.
We live in a time when it is genuinely easy to feel the weight of things. The world offers an endless supply of events to have opinions about, to resist, to wish were different, and the ego is more than happy to oblige. It will assign a verdict to every headline, carry a quiet grief for the way things ought to be, and spend considerable energy wishing reality would cooperate. That weight accumulates. Over time, the suffering that comes from wishing things were different can become as exhausting as the events themselves.
Practicing equanimity in this way, even clumsily, even briefly, opens a different door. It becomes possible to witness what is unfolding around you without drowning in it, to remain present to the world without being consumed by your distaste for it. The events don’t disappear and the caring doesn’t disappear either, but the suffering that comes from clinging to how things should be begins to loosen its grip. You become someone who can see clearly precisely because you are no longer white-knuckling the view.
Watch the baby again. Watch how present they are, how alive, how genuinely entertained by an ordinary afternoon. They are doing beautifully without an opinion about any of it.
That quality of presence is still in you, and awareness alone is enough to begin finding your way back to it. No special training, no perfect conditions, no dramatic transformation required. Just the willingness to notice, to soften, and to let the moment be what it is. Over time, that simple practice has a way of making life feel lighter, steadier, and more spacious than you might have thought possible from right where you are standing.
Jan💕
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