Watcher
I woke up one day. The body stirred, sounds filtered in, breath moving softly.
And yet, no one woke up.
There was no me arriving into the morning.
What used to be a personal moment — stretching, rising, remembering who I am, was strangely hollow. Everything was there, but the felt sense of a person doing it… gone.
This isn’t some grand awakening. No bliss, no fireworks.
Just absence.
Gentle.
Unremarkable.
Total.
Life continues: the partner laughs, coffee brews, a conversation unfolds. I respond. I explain. I even say “I.” But something once fundamental has fallen away.
There used to be a kind of spirit running through everything. A thread. A hum of presence I called me. Even suffering had a kind of richness to it—like I was growing, transforming, on a path. Everything was mine. Mine to endure, mine to savor.
But now…
That substance has thinned, evaporated.
The world still moves. Emotions still rise. Thoughts still appear.
But they don’t land anywhere.
No feeling of “being here” to root into.
I still need to act like there’s a someone. When explaining something, making a decision.
And for a moment, that structure returns like muscle memory.
But it collapses again just as easily.
No one holding the pose.
It’s not detachment. There’s no aloofness.
In fact, everything feels very immediate, and tactile.
But it no longer revolves around me owning all of it.
Traditions often speak of becoming “the watcher.” We all know that place too — where stillness watches thought, where awareness observes the world as if from some background.
But even that has gone.
No watcher.
Not even the sense of being.
Just this. Unclaimed.
Somehow, the absence of the watcher has not removed life, but clarified it.
A kind of transparency pervades everything. Not attainment.
Just the quiet vanishing of the one who was seeking all along.
Gun to my head, I would probably say It’s ordinary. Strange. A little sad, maybe.
But free in a way that has no opposite.
And if you ask me who’s writing this?
I’d say no one.
But the words still come.
