"I have always been with me, but not always conscious of my presence"

A paradox unfolds between being and knowing. The self is constant, like a pulse that continues whether attended to or not, yet awareness of that self flickers. One can live years as an unexamined companion to oneself, carried by habit, role, and noise, while the quiet witness within remains unacknowledged. The line separates existence from consciousness: presence as fact, awareness as practice.

It names a common estrangement. Daily life disperses attention across obligations, screens, ideologies, and automatic speech. The “I” becomes submerged in the “me”, the bundle of stories, titles, and anxieties, until the deeper sense of presence is forgotten. Yet its constancy is precisely why it is overlooked; what never leaves becomes invisible. Like breathing, it sustains us while slipping from notice, returning to view only in moments of pain, stillness, or wonder.

The awakening to one’s own presence is not narcissistic glare but a return to intimacy with experience. It resembles the discovery of a patient companion who has waited without reproach. This recognition rearranges time: memory gathers into a thread, and the future loosens its grip. Action becomes less reactive, more deliberate, because it begins from a sensed ground rather than from panic or mimicry. Solitude changes flavor, shifting from lack to companionship.

Language, too, edges toward its limit. The presence sensed here precedes words; it is more like a silence that knows. Poetry seeks that silence without extinguishing speech, allowing phrases that point and then step aside. To become conscious of one’s presence is to practice a listening that encompasses body, breath, and the slight distances within thought.

There is humility in acknowledging how often awareness lapses. Yet that humility is fertile. It invites a vigilant tenderness toward one’s own life and, by extension, toward others whose presence is just as constant and just as easily forgotten.