The Fan

If you press your face up to a fan - one of those pedestal fans on a pole, like this one:

- you'll find yourself in the midst of unceasing drama and action and change and excitement and turmoil.

But pull your attention just a couple of inches backward to the center point of those spinning blades - right where the incoming air gathers to be expelled - and you'll find, strangely, utter stillness and peace. That place is home. It's the source - the unchanging "cause" - while all the rest is varied "effect". And it's absolutely unremarkable and extraordinarily easy to miss.

You have a choice: to identify with the turmoil or with the source of it all (i.e. with the peace you actually are).


As I once wrote, I spend at least fifteen minutes after every gym workout in a lethargic slump. For several years, my slumping bench positioned me in view of a pedestal fan. Like Vasudeva (Hermann Hesse's ferryman) and his river, I pondered pretty much every ramification of that fan.