Today , I was at the office with a colleague preparing farewell gifts and cards for the 3 leaving trainees.. There was another colleague present , an ex trainee but now a contract agent. I was on autopilot I thought she was one of the leaving trainees:) I realized I was not making a simple mistake.
The person has changed, but at the moment, my perception hadn’t.
At that moment I realised I was not reacting to reality, but to a stored version of it. Physically I was in the present but perceptually I was in the past.
At this moment I began to suspect something . Perhaps presence is not a mystical state , it is correction of perception .
In education theory this would be called calibration ( University of Stanford 2025) as part of the paced learinng movement
Perhaps poetry some times performs the same operation. When Odysseas Elytis writes light and sea he does not give us new information . He prevents immediate recognition .
I will explore these in my next article.