The Bystander in Your Own Life

As some of you maybe aware I have recently had the privilege of going travelling in South America, and as part of this trip we went to the Amazon, and this blog is inspired by that experience.

There is something revealing about watching people wildlife spot in the jungle. Some arrive as though they have purchased an appointment with nature. They have their cameras ready, their expectations carefully assembled: a sloth, a toucan, a monkey, perhaps something rarer if the gods of the forest are feeling generous. They move from one location to the next, alert for the appearance of something worth photographing. And when nothing materialises, they are disappointed. The jungle, in their estimation, has failed to deliver.

But the jungle is not a theatre, and wildlife is not a performance, the more time you spend there, the more apparent it becomes that the most interesting things are rarely the things you went looking for. The forest reveals itself obliquely. A movement in the canopy that you almost dismiss. A sudden silence among the birds. A flicker of colour in the foliage. The longer you remain still, the more you begin to understand that seeing is not quite the same thing as looking. Looking is an act of intention; seeing requires a kind of surrender.

There is a concept in yoga called drishti: the gaze, or the point upon which attention rests. In asana, it is often described as a physical point of focus, but its deeper implication is more interesting. Where we place our attention shapes what we perceive. A scattered gaze produces a scattered experience; a steady gaze allows the world to come into greater definition.

Wildlife spotting is, in its own peculiar way, a practice in drishti. You learn to look without grasping. You learn that staring harder does not make an animal appear. You soften the gaze. You widen your field of awareness. You stop searching for one particular thing and begin noticing what is actually there.

There are people who move through the jungle as spectators, and people who seem to enter into it. The distinction is subtle but profound. One is concerned with acquisition: What did you see? What did you photograph? Was it worth the journey? The other is concerned with attention. They notice the humidity gathering on the leaves, the extraordinary architecture of a termite mound, the changing light beneath the trees, the calls whose sources they cannot identify. They are not waiting impatiently for the jungle to become interesting. They have understood that it already is.

Yoga has another word for this impulse to grasp: aparigraha, often translated as non-attachment or non-grasping. It is an invitation to loosen our insistence that experience give us what we want from it. The wildlife encounter does not have to become a photograph. The journey does not have to produce a story, the morning does not have to become memorable in order to have been worthwhile.

Perhaps this is also how we become bystanders in our own lives.

We can become so preoccupied with the moments that appear significant: the promotion, the journey, the relationship, the achievement, the photograph, that we begin to experience our lives as a sequence of things to be recorded rather than inhabited. We wait for something sufficiently remarkable to justify our attention. Meanwhile, whole days pass quietly beneath the canopy.

This is where the yogic practice of santosha, or contentment, feels particularly relevant. Contentment is not passive satisfaction with everything as it is, nor is it a refusal to want more. It is the capacity to meet the present without immediately declaring it insufficient. In the jungle, it might mean being genuinely interested in an hour in which nothing spectacular happens. In life, it might mean allowing an ordinary Tuesday to be a Tuesday, rather than treating it merely as an obstacle between one significant event and the next.

There is a peculiar irony in our modern appetite for documenting experience. We are surrounded by the evidence of our own existence, and yet can remain strangely absent from it.

But presence is not something a photograph can establish, Yoga repeatedly brings us back to the problem of attention: where it goes, how quickly it moves, what it clings to, and what it habitually overlooks. Pratyahara, traditionally described as the withdrawal or turning inward of the senses, is sometimes misunderstood as shutting the world out. Perhaps it can also be understood as becoming less compulsively governed by everything that demands our attention. Not seeing less, but choosing more carefully what we see.

The jungle makes this distinction tangible. When the mind stops insisting on a particular outcome, the senses become available again. You hear more. You see more. You begin to notice the almost imperceptible movements that were invisible when you were busy looking for the obvious.

And then, sometimes, after twenty uneventful minutes, the forest changes, a branch moves, a bird emerges. Something has been there all along, but it required you to become sufficiently still to notice it.

There is no guarantee, of course. You may sit for an hour and see nothing at all. But that, too, is part of the encounter and the practice of patience. The point was never simply to collect a sighting. It was to be there when the forest was being itself.

Perhaps a life worth inhabiting asks the same of us. Not that every day has to be extraordinary, but that we resist the temptation to stand outside our own experience, waiting for something more photogenic to begin. To stop treating the present as a corridor between more important events. To cultivate a steadier gaze. To loosen our grip on what we think an experience ought to contain. To become interested in what is actually here.

The jungle offers no consolation to the hurried observer. It simply continues, indifferent and magnificent, whether or not we notice. And perhaps that is its lesson, and the quiet lesson of yoga, too: life is not necessarily withholding itself from us. We may simply need to become still enough, attentive enough, and unattached enough to see it.

Naomi Hurst (she/her)