Traveling by car is like watching life on a screen, writes Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, his now classic account of a motorcycle journey with his 11-year-old son that is really an inquiry into values.“You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone.”

The secret of motorcycle maintenance—and of living a life that has value—has to do with drawing our attention to the quality of what confronts us here and now. No matter what we are thinking about or doing, according to Pirsig, we can cultivate a double awareness—attentive to our thoughts and the work we are doing, yet sensitive to the quality of what is happening, to what is unknown, open to the whole scene.

This was the exactly the kind of attention I wished I’d had that day on the Metro North train, six months after September 11, when my 11-year-old daughter talked about how she should have been born in the Age of Middle Earth– when she had hinted that she was capable of courage and sacrifice, of a life that was full of value and consequence unlike our contemporary life which seemed (go figure) more like a movie.

Alexandra had needed my presence just then, minus the words of wisdom. These days, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and thinkers in many disciplines are supplying evidence of an innate moral sense, and I knew on some level that day that my daughter had it and that she was reaching beyond instinct towards one of the Large Ideas that people have guided their lives by in every tradition and time, that human beings are born to set out on a quest and that (in the words of the founder of this magazine) “whatever purpose life holds it demands from him the discovery of his own meaning, his own totality and identity.”

Rilke once urged an aspiring poet to look at the world the way children do, from “the depth of their own solitude.” He believed that children can look at the urgent business of the adult world and see it for what it is, hollow and detached from real life. Even when kids are fantasizing up a storm, they have a way of staying close to themselves and connected to what is possible and what really matters. What I missed because I couldn’t muster the energy it took to be fully present was that Alexandra wasn’t talking about escaping but about transformation.

Right after the attacks, there seemed to be a new quality of presence all over Manhattan. One local journalist noted a general “suspension of distraction.” New Yorkers on the subways and streets were making eye contact, acknowledging that we lived in a shared world, surrounded by mystery. It was as if the shock of what happened had jarred most of us loose from our self-enclosed thoughts and certainties. There was widespread acknowledgment that we didn’t know anything about the way the world worked.

“The only thing we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom,” writes Tolstoy. Briefly, New Yorkers were wise. But this soon passed.

On Christmas Eve in Grand Central Station, I’d seen heavily armed National Guard troops and police officers surround a deranged old homeless woman who had pushed her shopping cart into the terminal to take shelter from a freezing winter rain. She’d stood clutching a broken doll, looking bewildered as the officers poked through the possessions that were spread out on the ground around her. I noticed one young officer in particular. His stance was stern but he had a pitying, questioning look in his eyes, as if he were watching himself and was incredulous that all that training and readiness to face danger had come down to this. Life can be like this, I thought as I watched him. It can carry us along passively, even when we have the best intentions.

In the days after the attacks, , a stencil appeared on the sidewalks all over downtown Manhattan. It featured a cartoon fist brandishing a rock and it read “Drop the rock,” It was startling to come upon this admonition to evolve beyond retaliation at such a time. Years later, I can see the fist of my own mind was gripping my own views so tightly I couldn’t see the truth when it appeared. The real truth of who we are and what matters is situational, I learned. It is embedded in the unique particulars of the moment. Hope speaks of Middle Earth while riding Metro North.

I have a perfectly good excuse, of course. Fear had rolled over the city like fog, and fear contracts the mind. Everything has a different quality up close, as Pirsig writes. Things stop being things. We see that even painful events have hidden reserves, surprises, truths, even joys that come to us like grace. Fear of a thing–Cancer, College, the Next Terrorist Strike—is another kind of suffering entirely, a sometimes subtle mental disease, a call to arms. I thought I was being open to Alexandra but it was more like I had the safety off my gun and I was ready to shoot.

We want to be aware and present and we don’t want it. We long to be liberated from our separation from others, from our children, from life as it is, yet another force in us pulls against it, insisting on our views and opinions, our selves. Thomas Merton compared the way our ego-centric consciousness splits off from the selfless awareness of Being with original sin. If this is the case, even single-cell organisms–even our own cells–are sinners, because they can discern the difference between self and other, reflexively defending itself against invaders.

Yet it is always also possible to go beyond the mechanical, beyond what has come before. These days, scientific studies are revealing that even genetically identical E.coli bacteria express individuality, behaving in different ways in identical conditions. Even in microbes, the same genes and the same genetic network can lead to different fates.

What does it mean to be open? What does it mean to seek a greater reality, to realize a greater identity? In the first “Focus” essay of the first issue of this magazine, D.M.Dooling writes: “Conviction and quest are not only not incompatible, they are essential to each other. Parsifal could never have asked the right question had he not been convinced about the existence and the primordial importance of the Grail.”

What are your convictions? How do you carry them so that it helps you on your quest? How do you open to the truth when it appears?