Is the Vicarious Life worth Fighting For?

Vicarious experience is hard work to which perhaps not all souls are suited for... It involves two components, or three if that is how you prefer to count it. It requires of course the Observer and the Observed; and one thing more! Awareness of Observation!!

That is to say Metacognition on the part of the Observer... the Observed being allowed a passive role.

Without this aspect of awareness no vicarious processing occurs. The root of the word is vicis, meaning an interchange or substitution carried out. Note the active. It is the difference between a person staring at a pond, and a person wondering what's in the pond. They both see the water, the fowl, the wilderness, and feel the breeze, and smell or even taste the humidity of the surrounding landscape. But the second, by that momentous leap of imagination has already teleported and entered in, now imagining the cold, the damp liquid, the murky ground beneath, with algae clinging between the toes of the feet. Maybe even had a moment of panic, submerged under, before resurfacing... Same for reading a book. One reader understands the meaning of the words, paints a mental picture even; Another feels the wording with psychosomatic precision.

My thinking in posing the question (phrasing of which abysmal my apologies!) was that Sensitivity requires training and maintenance. Hence, a fight. In the way a knife needs the sharpening stone to restore its edge from time to time. A reminder to myself that we get dull. Not bored, but dulled. It's not about who or what we see outside, but how we process on the inside.

I have been really struggling to keep spirits up these last few years, for no apparent reason, as life is rewarding and full. I have a wonderful, loving artistically gifted husband, an affectionate brilliant son, a calm place to live, demanding but meaningful work... so sensitivity and creativity should be full tilt... but I find it slipping...and I wonder, is it I that have I grown less sensitive? are my powers of empathy fading? am I lazy in not seeing things in their unique intricate compounded richness?

I feel a wall between me and the outside.

And so, a certain tristesse. I remember when I was quite young, I would blush profusely at any provocation drawing warranted or unwarranted attention to myself as Observer of the world around me. Somehow I was ashamed to be seen as seeing... My closest friend at the time, who is now passed, said to me with a grin: "Would you rather be a rock?"

"YES!" I wanted nothing more than the stability and reliability of a rock, through and through. Imperturbability. He laughed sympathetically, while I cried bitterly. Some years later, my affliction passed, and NOT without my noticing. I noticed alright. And I mourned it. I remember in horror what I had foolishly and spitefully said, and thought: "This is it. This is how it begins... this is my decline, and my just punishment. I am losing my Sensitivity."

Naturally, I comforted myself so that I could carry on, and put up all sorts of prompts and supports to ensure that I could at least pretend I was compensating for my loss with rigorous self Discipline. I worked hard to feed the Vicarious.

But so it begins... I am convinced. It begins at different points for each of us-- the losing of our higher order abilities. No longer perceiving the phantom limbs that tie us to all Experience. Hence, my question to you in this challenge about the worth of The Fight, for the Life within.

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