I am riding in a shuttle bus from the small town of Mikolajki (pronounced “Mike Wazowski”) back to Warsaw. I have been living in a vaccuum for a week, singing worship songs for missionaries at a resort hotel in the middle of nowhere. And now here I am, bouncing down the hilly back-country of Poland with those trademark iPod headphones in my ears. The Weepies are emoting softly, secretly to me. They sing, “Back and forth we ply these oars, they move in time and get entwined.” I couldn’t be enjoying this moment more purely. Then I notice myself moving with the beat, mouthing the words. I notice myself.

This is always a problem for me.

And now I wonder if I am enjoying myself too much, too publicly. Are my traveling companions watching me? If so, should I take it easy (the angel on my left shoulder) or ham it up and give them something to watch (the devil on my right)? As I think on these things, I am still watching the fields and fences roll by. Suddenly, the sun breaks through the clouds and I can see in my glasses the reflection of my own eye, huge, starting me down pointe blank.

Annie Dillard, in her book, “An American Childhood,” writes of her own awakening to self: “For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn’t remember how to forget myself. I didn’t want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else–-but swerve as I might, I couldn’t avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn’t hush. So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet—inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at last their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted.”

My pastor recently listed the opressive self, with its tawdry obessions and nagging feelings of awkwardness, among the heavy things we will shed when we die. I, for one, will be relieved to escape the close reflection of my own eye.