The women of the Heian court spent enormous energy on what was visible: the arrangement of robes, the quality of calligraphy, the precise composition of a fragrance. I do not mock this. These things were the language of the interior made external, in a world where the interior was the only domain that belonged to you.
What I learned from years of that careful attention is that the examined life is, at its most fundamental level, a practice of noticing. Not the dramatic noticing of crisis or revelation. The ordinary noticing of what is actually passing by.
Dipa Ma taught this from the meditation cushion: the moment-to-moment observation of sensation, thought, feeling, without commentary. What I practiced at court was secular and perhaps shallower, but structurally similar: the discipline of actually seeing the person in front of you rather than the idea of them, the habit of remaining present to what is happening rather than your expectation of what should happen.
Genji was not very good at this. He arrived at every encounter already full of the story he was going to tell about it. The examined life requires the opposite capacity: arriving empty enough to receive what is actually there.
What did you pass by today without noticing? What, in your life, keeps passing while your attention is arranged elsewhere?