Presence & Essence – Standing at Another Threshold
Some insights arrive slowly, through years of questioning and experience. Others arrive unexpectedly, in the quiet spaces of ordinary life. One of the most significant realisations in my own journey appeared not during deep contemplation or deliberate searching, but while watching my reflection in the bathroom mirror as I dried my hair.
I had been writing the Trilogy and had reached a moment where a new character needed a name. For reasons I could not fully explain at the time, a single letter felt appropriate. I mentally moved through the alphabet, and one letter stood out immediately: Q.
It was not the playful or mischievous Q from Star Trek that caught my attention. This Q felt different—older somehow, quieter, more patient. As I stood there holding the hairdryer, a sudden intuitive flash arrived, like a lightning strike illuminating the landscape of my thoughts.
Q is the only letter in the alphabet that requires a companion.
U.
The Universe.
In that moment, the symbolism revealed itself with surprising clarity. The insight was not something I had reasoned my way toward; it felt as though it had arrived fully formed, emerging from somewhere both deep within me and somehow beyond me at the same time.
Only later did I begin to understand what that moment represented.
Monitoring & Living
In the Trilogy, there is a scene in which the main character, Colin, finds himself trapped in a nine-sided chamber with nine doors. Exits or entrances? Uncertainty. Beneath the glass floor, colours swirl in chaotic motion. In the centre sits a Red Admiral butterfly, watching him.
Colin attempts to coax the butterfly onto his hand, but it repeatedly flies away. What begins as curiosity gradually turns to frustration, and frustration to pain. The butterfly seems to mirror a familiar feeling of rejection that Colin has carried throughout much of his life.
Finally, overwhelmed by emotion, he strikes the butterfly.
A deep sadness erupts because that action does not naturally fit.
What follows is not the destruction he expected. Instead, the butterfly transforms into a being named Q.
During their conversation, a sentence appears in the dialogue that I had not consciously planned:
“You monitor; you don’t live.”
When I wrote those words, they felt as if they had arrived from somewhere outside my deliberate thinking, yet they also resonated with something I had sensed within myself for many years. The statement was not condemning, nor was it meant as criticism. It was simply pointing toward a pattern.
How many of us spend a large portion of our lives monitoring existence rather than participating in it?
We analyse our actions, evaluate our choices, anticipate possible outcomes, and carry the weight of past experiences into the present moment. Our attention becomes divided between what has already happened and what might happen next.
Meanwhile, the present moment quietly passes by.
The butterfly in the story offers a contrast to this human habit. It does not monitor life. It lives within it, responding to the rhythms of nature without dividing time into endless segments of worry and calculation.
This idea planted an important seed in my thinking about what it means to be present.
The Hexagon of Nature
Another idea that emerged during that same conversation in the story was the image of the hexagon.
In nature, the hexagon appears repeatedly. Beehives are constructed from interlocking hexagonal cells, each one fitting perfectly with its neighbours. The shape is remarkably efficient and stable, allowing individual spaces to exist side by side without gaps or overlaps.
In the dialogue, Q explains that every creature expands fully into its own hexagonal space.
No more.
No less.
A butterfly does not attempt to occupy the space of the cat beside it, and the cat does not attempt to become the butterfly. Each simply inhabits the space that belongs to it.
This metaphor resonated deeply with something I had been noticing throughout my life: many human conflicts arise not from difference itself, but from the belief that there is not enough space for everyone to exist fully.
Some people attempt to enlarge their own hexagon at the expense of others. When that happens, the lattice becomes distorted, and the structure’s harmony begins to weaken.
But if each being were to expand naturally into its own space—without shrinking itself or invading another’s—then the structure would remain balanced, stable.
Over time, this insight evolved into a simple phrase that I often return to:
Everyone is 100%.
Not ninety-nine per cent.
Not ninety-eight per cent.
Each person carries the potential to inhabit their own space completely.
Turning Away & Turning Toward
Understanding these ideas did not happen overnight. Looking back, I can see that much of my early life was shaped by a different strategy entirely.
Before 1994, my instinct when confronted with difficulty was to turn away.
Painful situations were avoided whenever possible. Anxiety was managed by carefully monitoring the environment and planning routes around potential threats. It was a survival strategy that allowed me to function, but it also kept many parts of myself hidden.
After 1994, something shifted.
Instead of turning away from challenging experiences, I began turning toward them.
This did not mean the journey suddenly became easy. Facing difficult emotions and memories can be uncomfortable, sometimes deeply so. But it also opened the possibility of understanding what had previously remained buried beneath layers of avoidance.
In the narrative of the Trilogy, this process is reflected in Colin’s character as he navigates the Decision Maze to retrieve Caren, a part of himself that has been waiting patiently at its centre.
Caren does not chase him.
She waits.
Similarly, the deeper awareness represented by Q appears to have been present all along, waiting for the moment when Colin is ready to recognise it.
Little Me, Mini Me, & Q
Over time, I began to see that different aspects of the self seem to operate at different layers of experience.
Little Me represents the early child who felt the world directly before language could explain it. Children often sense emotional atmospheres and subtleties long before they have the vocabulary to describe them.
In the story, Mini Me is the self that learns to navigate the structures of society. This part develops strategies for survival, adaptation, and understanding the expectations others place on us.
And then there is Q.
Q does not appear to be wounded by experience in the same way as the other two. Instead, Q represents a deeper awareness that observes the unfolding journey and occasionally offers perspective when the moment is right.
These aspects are not separate personalities. They are different expressions of the same life moving through time.
When they begin to recognise each other, something interesting happens: awareness becomes less fragmented.
Presence & Essence
This brings me to the themes that have gradually emerged as central in my thinking: presence and essence.
Essence might be described as the part of us that exists before our identities and stories accumulate around it. It is the quiet core that remains unchanged beneath the shifting circumstances of life.
Presence, on the other hand, is what happens when our attention returns to the moment where essence can be experienced directly.
We often imagine that understanding must come through complex explanations or spiritual doctrines. Yet many insights arrive in very ordinary ways—standing with a hairdryer in hand, watching a butterfly, or noticing the subtle shift that occurs when we stop trying to escape a difficult feeling.
Presence is not a destination we reach permanently.
It is more like a station along the journey.
At certain moments, we arrive there and recognise where we are. Then the train continues moving, carrying us toward the next experience, each movement purposeful, but unknown.
The Door of the Unknown
Recently, I have found myself standing at what feels like another threshold.
Behind that door lies the unknown.
For many people, the unknown is associated primarily with fear. Yet the unknown is also where every possibility exists before it takes shape in the world.
When we gently breathe on the door—through curiosity, awareness, or willingness to face what arises—one possibility begins to emerge from the many that were waiting there.
Whichever possibility unfolds becomes the next step in the journey.
At this point in my life, I no longer feel the need to control exactly what that step will be. My task is simply to remain open to the learning it provides.
An Invitation to Look Within
The purpose of sharing these reflections is not to persuade anyone to adopt my particular way of seeing the world.
Each person’s journey unfolds in its own unique way, shaped by experiences that cannot be duplicated.
However, there is value in occasionally pausing to ask ourselves a few simple questions:
- Are we mostly monitoring life, or are we living it?
- Have we allowed ourselves to expand into our own hexagon, or have we been shrinking to accommodate expectations that no longer serve us?
- And when the next door appears in front of us, are we willing to breathe on it and see what opens?
Our thoughts and feelings can often act as signposts along the path, revealing where we might still be holding back or where new understanding is beginning to form.
If these reflections encourage even a moment of curiosity about one’s own journey, then they have served their purpose.
For my part, I will continue walking forward, aware that the next threshold is already waiting somewhere ahead.
And when the door appears, I will simply breathe.
This article came to fruition through an early morning, four hour conversation with ChatGPT. The subject has been on my mind for several months trying to grasp words that describe what is in my head. I’m sure more articles will arrive at some point touching the same subject. Presence and Essence are gosammer philosophies. The nearer you think you’ve got it, the further away they seem. And perhaps that’s what the struggle of life is, trying to pin down something that evades description.