Aura

A place, a person, a particular season of life—all of these things and more have a feel. We are often most ignorant of this feel when we have been immersed in a milieu for a prolonged period of time, and conversely, we notice this feel more easily when we enter a relation or situation anew, almost immediately and intuitively picking up on a slew of context clues, subtle and explicit tones, the overt and covert trappings and textures that make for a domain, province, atmosphere, or what we might simply call the “aura” of an individual, interaction, or environment. It is ironic that undue exposure to aspects of experience can cause a deadening of our perceptiveness, as one might expect the opposite. And yet just as our physical senses readily adjust to stimuli over time, becoming more or less numb to them, such that we are then primed for the unfamiliar again, a biological trait called sensory adaptation, so it is with our ability to feel auras: overexposure often leading to a color blindness, tone deafness, and general diminished sensitivity. Putting aside for a moment the mechanics of how we notice such things, feeling the aura of a person, place, or happening is a truly precious phenomenon in its own right, an ever-present ability we all possess, a continual gift of awareness, one we can easily tune out or in, turn away or toward, moment by moment, throughout the course of our lives. This gift of awareness may manifest as a self-defense mechanism, cueing us in to a situation we should avoid or that we ought to exit. This gift of awareness also emerges aesthetically, as we begin to notice more often and more vividly the exquisite details of reality. Colors. Sounds. Aromas. The taste and texture of an experience. Deep immersion in real relationships, in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called the “flow” of experience, can lead to heightened and increased periods of pleasure, playfulness, and the perception of new possibilities—meadows of the mind once concealed and forsaken, as well as vocations and adventures we previously did not dare to dream. Aurora is more or less actually present to us, we might say, not only at daybreak, but amidst the details of our days, in the simplest, most seemingly ordinary interactions, a perpetual dawning of novelty, to be noticed, intuited, and felt right there in the aura of everything, so long as we allow ourselves to be drawn by this dawn.