What if the line between being awake & not being awake is fat and blurry?

A story

The Fat blurry Line

For years she had thought awakening would be unmistakable. A blinding clarity. A final arrival. Something that divided then from now with a precision so sharp it could never be doubted.

And yet, one afternoon as she sat by the window watching rain trail down the glass, she realized: it had already happened. Not once, but many times.

Moments she had dismissed as “just ordinary.”
Moments she had passed over because they weren’t dramatic enough to be judged as awakening.
The stillness while brushing her teeth.
The quiet joy in watching steam rise from a kettle.
The dissolving of a thought mid-complaint, leaving only breath.
All of it had been it. But unnoticed, because the mind had been waiting for something bigger, louder, holier.

Now she saw it differently. The line between asleep and awake wasn’t a razor’s edge at all. It was wide, porous, blurry. And she had walked across it countless times without knowing, only to wander back into habit.

But that too was part of it.
The blur itself was awake.

She remembered moments of contraction — the sharp sting of judgment, the flare of irritation, the reflex to defend herself. Once, these had been taken as proof she was not there yet. Now she saw more gently: they were simply weather. They still arrived, but something new was absent — the identification. They no longer built a “self” around them.

This was the quiet revolution: awakening hadn’t erased unawakened reactions. It had made them transparent. A tightening in the chest, a story firing in the mind — these still came. But they passed through without leaving residue, like footprints in water.

She laughed softly at the irony. The whole journey she had been measuring herself against an idea of perfection. She thought awakening meant never flinching, never forgetting, never spiraling. But here it was: utterly ordinary. Messy and kind. Not a final state, but a way of seeing.

She saw the whole line now — from doubt to clarity, from contraction to openness — and every step of it belonged. There was no “point” to cross. No finishing line. Just life, awake in its blur.

And in that realization, something softened completely.
Nothing more to chase.
Nothing more to prove.
Awakening was never elsewhere.
It was here — in every unnoticed pause, every tender miss, every ordinary breath.

Ordinary, yes.
But ordinary had never been so alive.

Investigative Exercise: Catching the Overlooked

1. Pause right now.
   Don’t add anything. Don’t subtract anything. Just notice what’s here — the light, the sounds, the sensations in the body.

2. Ask quietly:
   If I weren’t trying to measure this moment, what’s already present?
   Let the answer come not in words, but in raw seeing, hearing, sensing.

3. Catch the judgment.
   Notice if the mind says, “This is too ordinary,” or “This can’t be it.”
   See those as just more thoughts. They are not the moment — they’re commentary about the moment.

4. Return to the raw.
   What is actually happening? A hum in the background? The rise and fall of the breath? The feeling of the ground beneath your feet?
   This is what was overlooked before — the simple, unadorned fact of being.

5. Stay with the ordinariness.
   Let the simplicity itself be the portal. Not because it is special, but because it is what was always missed when waiting for something dramatic.

6. Anchor it.
   Pick one detail — maybe the pressure of the chair, the sound of the room, the weight of your own hands.
   Let that be the reminder: awakening is here, even in this.