When things follow their normal flow, it is hard to notice what really matters. What truly matters demands focused attention, because it consists of tiny things that escape the cold glare of commercialization. Almost as a survival trait, we the living tend toward patterns that repeat. Repetition lends the challenge of living a predictability that brushes against security. Brushes against it, passes close, but in truth unpredictability is the permanent companion of this human adventure.

Around us, multiple uncontrollable vectors take turns, out of our hands and, often, beyond our capacity to absorb, interpret and internalize. Which means, on the surface, that we should, at the very least, doubt our certainties.

My idea is that this doubt not be directed at people, but at events. That doubt, properly trained, could play the role of an alarm that would wake us momentarily, take us off autopilot and make the possible contact with objective reality.

I know it sounds simple when said or written and I know how complicated it is when deliberately tried. It has been my practice for quite some time.

Wrestling with fantasies, hopes and dreams is part of “leaving autopilot.” The great challenge is to set aside, temporarily, those life-vitalizers without losing them for good. Without these three pillars, discouragement and hopelessness can settle into our inner dialogue. And it is not good when that happens. The dark corridor of a journey without fantasies, hopes and dreams, paradoxically, supports the lethargy of automatism.

I like to think of a solution in which we can train our brain to move freely between these three pillars and objective reality, keeping awareness on duty. Or one in which we can hold our attention so as to distinguish, without great suffering, what is from what is not.

That would already be special, since attention, by itself, supports personal power. It can keep us from turning into puppets of other people’s will and control on the passive end of power plays.

Analyzing power plays in different settings (home, work, politics and others), we can find the manipulated human immersed in their inner world, with no attention to the here and now. This being used as a pawn was not trained to think and to pay attention. They were not given the chance to think differently from the automatic patterns that adorned their development.

Paths parallel to conformity were presented as risk, hell, antisocial behavior, lack of commitment, indiscipline, heresy and many other labels, in every dimension of human life.

I am overcome by an enormous sadness in the moments when I manage to escape autopilot, when I look around and watch people placing their belief and their action in fictions skillfully crafted to control.

This method (because it is a method) invades families, companies, relationships. What truly has value, such as human life, for example, gets lost in coordinated automatism.

Suddenly, something that in my childhood was considered a great offense, lying, joins the method of control, and, blind, people repeat and repeat and repeat plots elaborated with refinements to abduct the herald’s soul.

I feel small and, I confess, often with a fierce desire to join the automatic mode, numbing my agonies to the point of not feeling. I have not managed yet. And I keep making determined moves not to automate my living. Of course my thoughts, now and then, tangle with a wish to scream out loud. To shout in public, like a Cassandra (the one from Troy), asking that the march of the automatic (to the sound of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”) stop so we can give true attention to ourselves or, at least, to the children.

I am escaping little by little, collecting authentic moments in which I can be who I am, say what I think, living without the imposition of choreographies sold as ideals. I make contracts with people (few) around me to bear the jolt together. Because I know the cost of seeing.

My proposal for myself is to face it with gentleness. I manage nearly all the time. In the moments when I falter, I have been lucky to see the friendly hand that helps me up. A gift of non-automatism.