Recognizing & Resisting Fixed Trajectories

Language reflects thought.  The personal pronoun I, given emphasis in its capitalization, implies an unchanging singularity, cause and will, as in  I pealed an orange.  Actually, it pealed the orange, spun out with a minimum of attention, as it has many, many times before.  I can imagine a form of brain damage resulting in the loss of this complex program, making the coordinated movement of pealing an orange very difficult, requiring active attention, like learning to tie your shoes. But it doesn't now;  it happens of it-self.

I pealed the orange, but what I are we referring to, particularly when I am able to observe the activity, separated, as if watching a movie on pealing oranges.   I might, with intent, peal the orange a new way, counterclockwise, as if against the moving habit, and the activity would require the active allocation of attention, and I might be a little more present.

It takes me a relatively short time to shower, five minutes perhaps.  The bar of soap glides in efficient, practiced motions.  I imagine a study of the bar's path revealing that it recurs precisely by the same course and timing everyday, over a lifetime, like a Swiss train.  

Complex behavior patterns of this type are called a schemata.  A schema is initiated when we walk into a restaurant, or into a grocery store, or turn on the shower:  it is the amalgam of behaviors and expectations associated with a context.  A schema is a complex software program, executed in response to a particular stimulus.  The schema is fired, automatically, immediately, without any need for the presence of I. 

I notice this about showering, which I think is generally true:  Just as the movement of the soap is executed according to a strict pattern, so too is the quality of mentation that accompanies the motion.  That is, I daydream, passive, drifting by association, and this quality of wandering mind is patterned, the intellectual side of the showering schema, programmed and fixed.  There is no I required.  It happens, by pattern, like executing a software routine.

Our use of language is deceiving, particularly in how we refer to ourselves, our state, using the present tense personal pronoun I.  It's not true.  We speak of a shower schema, or a restaurant schema, or a human life schema.  All are patterned, all reactive, all external.  Our trajectory is fixed.  

All of us experience moments of separation from the patterns of life, through glimmers of presence, as if something momentarily arises to the surface to feel something on the order of I-am-just-now.  Then it's gone.  

How do I increase the frequency and duration of these moments?  What might this work look like?  I take it very practically:  Am I able to walk from here to the kitchen while maintaining an unbroken sense of presence -- the setting of a small aim of attention.