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Unmooredness is feeling that your walls of home are made of nothing stiffer than a daydream.
It can feel like existing without gravity or realizing you are asleep.
Other people, physical environments, the past and future— may seem to have diffused, to be ungraspable as dust in a beam of light.
It is a moment of recognition.
We are always fundamentally unmoored, in a reality that never stops shifting.
There is no thing solid to save us from disintegration or pin us in place to stay.
Nothing guarantees our tiny hearts, our three pound brains, even one of our essential velvety veins.
Around us, things, beings and states change always. Unattached to any solid.
We are fundamentally vulnerable, enjoying illusions of security we can sometimes extend.
The feeling of being unmoored often attends major life transitions and losses when, on top of one’s lost circumstance or person, one must also grieve the feeling that one was securely held.
When what you have come to take for granted disappears— even by choice, such as while traveling— one sees unavoidably that nothing can be taken as a given.
What once danced in your arms, beat its warm heart in your hearing, will become thin replicas in your head.
Feeling unmoored is often accompanied by a sense of being alone. Who can be counted on? Who is real?
At its height, one may feel alone even from oneself— who is this space being?
The walls of identity fall as so much identity is in what surrounds us: its tethering names, its reflective surfaces, its cocreation.
The feeling of being unmoored is the feeling of something Real. It does not exist to be overcome. It can be the work of a lifetime to yield to this knowing.
It is a gift, rescuing us from mind states that continually make The Miracle disappear— that turns all things banal and ordinary. Given.
Feeling unmoored can awaken us to the delicious shock that we exist … and so do infinite things to love.
Even as they promise gently: I will disappear.