The world of my senses did not vanish, nor choirs of angels appear following what I characterize as my realization. There were, nonetheless, interesting new experiences. One was seeing things for what seemed like the first time. My childhood sense of curiosity re-appeared. It gave me an appreciation of the wonder of the world in the smallest things. The dew on the grass in the morning and how it reflected light. It drew me to the intricate details of the leaves and colors of flowers and the light on objects. I awakened from a black and white dream into a world of technicolor. An enhanced attentiveness and focused curiosity accompanied this hypersensitivity. But it was not a negative, schizophrenic-like experience, in which my brain could not filter out irrelevant things and thus felt overwhelmed. Instead, there was a calmness and a joy to it, a genuine delight in the experience.
I remember going outside one afternoon and looking up at the white wispy clouds in the sky. They appeared arranged by a master artist as buds around a bright sun. I saw the red, pink, and yellow streaks of light from that sun as streaks of color from this artist’s palette painting the sky in translucent pastels. I then looked down and saw the reddish-brown leaves from the western sycamore outside our home and saw the carpet of leaves on the sidewalk. Looking at one leaf, the intricacy of the veins struck me as a well-planned highway transporting chlorophyll, the miracle protein that converts sunlight into oxygen. What struck me with even more force was the sense that all this was for my benefit. More interesting than this hypersensitivity to sensory experiences was a natural increase in social behavior that connected me more with life. Having been an introvert most of my life, I found a remarkable unfoldment in empathy and concern for the feelings of others. These changes in perspective and my increased awareness of them is, I am certain, the difference between truly living and being lost in the fog of self-centeredness.