The news came quietly, as these things often do—Jane Goodall died this week at ninety-one, her long life devoted to a practice so simple it sounds almost absurd to our modern ears: she sat still and watched. For decades, she observed chimpanzees in the forests of Tanzania, not rushing to conclusions, not imposing human frameworks onto animal behavior, but simply being present with what was actually there. In doing so, she revolutionized our understanding of primates, of tool use, of the very boundaries we’d drawn between human and animal consciousness.
I find myself thinking about what it means to truly watch something. Not to glance, not to monitor, not to consume content about a thing—but to give ourselves so completely to observation that we become permeable to what we’re witnessing. There’s something almost scandalous about this in our current moment, when AI can generate synthetic realities in seconds, when information moves faster than comprehension, when the cultural pressure is always toward production, efficiency, the next thing.
Goodall’s method wasn’t new, of course. She was drawing from a well so ancient we can barely see its bottom.
The Practice of Patient Seeing
In the Buddhist tradition, there’s a practice called vipassana—often translated as “insight meditation,” but the word literally means “to see things as they really are.” The practitioner sits, watches the breath, notices thoughts arising and passing, sensations appearing and dissolving. No grasping, no rejecting, just the steady cultivation of attention that doesn’t impose itself on experience. The Pali texts describe this as developing the eye that sees clearly, unclouded by the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion.
What strikes me is how similar this sounds to what Goodall was doing in Gombe Stream. She wasn’t there to prove a hypothesis or advance a career—at least not primarily. She was there to see chimpanzees as they actually were, not as human theories suggested they should be. She had to learn to set aside the frameworks she’d inherited, the tendency to anthropomorphize or to maintain rigid species boundaries. She had to develop, over years, the capacity to witness without the constant interference of her own assumptions.
The Taoist sages would have recognized this immediately. Chuang Tzu wrote about wu wei—often translated as “non-action” or “effortless action”—but perhaps better understood as moving in harmony with the natural unfolding of things rather than forcing outcomes. “The perfect man,” he wrote, “employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep.” Goodall’s decades of observation were a kind of wu wei, a refusal to force nature into preconceived categories, a willingness to let the chimpanzees teach her rather than the other way around.
The Revolutionary Act of Stillness
There’s something deeply countercultural about sustained observation. Our economies demand productivity; our technologies promise instant access to anything; our political systems reward quick reactions and confident assertions. To sit quietly for years, watching, waiting for understanding to emerge slowly—this feels almost transgressive.
The Christian contemplative tradition understood this tension. The Desert Fathers and Mothers fled to the wilderness not out of misanthropy but out of a recognition that transformation requires sustained attention in conditions of relative silence and simplicity. “Be still,” the Psalmist writes, “and know that I am God.” The stillness isn’t emptiness—it’s the fertile ground where true knowing becomes possible. Thomas Merton, writing from his hermitage in Kentucky, observed that “the contemplative is not the man who has fiery visions of the seraphim, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert.”
Goodall risked her mind in a different kind of desert—the forest where human certainties didn’t apply, where she had to learn a different language, where patience was the only methodology that worked. She describes in her writings how the chimpanzees initially fled from her, how it took months before they would tolerate her presence, how the breakthrough moments came not through clever tricks but through the slow building of trust that only time and consistency can create.
This is what we’ve lost, or what we’re in danger of losing—the understanding that some forms of knowledge can’t be rushed, that some insights only emerge from the kind of attention that our culture has almost completely devalued. We want the data, the summary, the takeaway. We don’t want to sit for years in uncomfortable proximity to what we don’t yet understand.
Learning From the Other
Indigenous wisdom traditions have always known what Goodall demonstrated: that the natural world is a teacher, and that learning requires humility. The Lakota phrase mitakuye oyasin—”all my relations”—expresses a worldview in which humans are embedded in a web of relationships with all beings, not separate from or superior to the rest of creation. To learn from animals, plants, the land itself requires a kind of listening that Western epistemology has too often dismissed as primitive or unscientific.
But Goodall’s science was revolutionary precisely because it incorporated this older way of knowing. She didn’t go to Tanzania to study “subjects”—she went to learn from individuals. She gave the chimpanzees names instead of numbers, a choice that was criticized at the time as too sentimental, too anthropomorphic. But she understood something her critics didn’t: that reducing beings to data points creates a kind of blindness. To see clearly, she had to see them as who they were, not what she expected them to be.
The Sufi poets speak of fana, the annihilation of the ego that allows one to perceive reality without the constant static of self-interest and self-protection. “When I let go of what I am,” Rumi writes, “I become what I might be.” Goodall let go of what she thought she knew about chimpanzees, about science, about the proper boundaries between observer and observed. In doing so, she became someone who could actually see—and in seeing, she helped us all see differently.
The Mirror of Attention
What fascinates me most about Goodall’s work is what it reveals about the nature of attention itself. When we truly watch something—not to use it, not to fix it, not to make it serve our purposes, but simply to understand it on its own terms—we discover that observation is not a one-way street. The watcher is changed by what is watched.
The Stoics understood this. Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations about the practice of seeing things as they truly are, stripped of the judgments and projections we layer onto them. “Look at everything that exists,” he instructs, “and observe that it is already in dissolution and in change.” This isn’t nihilism—it’s a practice of attention that frees us from our habitual ways of seeing, our tendency to make everything confirm what we already believe.
Goodall went to Africa with some basic assumptions about chimpanzees and came back having discovered that they make tools, wage war, show compassion, experience grief. Every one of these discoveries required her to let go of previous certainties. The chimps were her teachers, but only because she was willing to be taught—which meant being willing to be wrong, to have her understanding overturned by what she actually witnessed rather than by what theory predicted.
In an Age of Artificial Seeing
The timing of Goodall’s death feels significant. We’re living in a moment when artificial intelligence can generate images and videos indistinguishable from reality, when “seeing” increasingly means consuming algorithmically curated content, when the line between the authentic and the synthetic grows harder to discern. OpenAI just released a new video generation tool that can create crowds, concerts, entire scenes from text prompts. The technology is impressive, but it raises an uncomfortable question: if we can fabricate anything, what happens to our capacity for genuine observation?
Goodall’s life offers a kind of answer, or at least a reminder. There’s a difference between generating images and actually seeing. There’s a difference between processing information and developing understanding. There’s a difference between watching a screen and sitting in the forest, year after year, until the chimps stop running away and start coming closer, until you begin to recognize individuals, learn their relationships, witness their lives unfolding in all their complexity and particularity.
The wisdom traditions all point toward this distinction, though they use different language. They speak of awakening, enlightenment, liberation, union—words that gesture toward a way of perceiving that cuts through the veils of illusion, habit, and self-deception. They all suggest that this deeper seeing requires practice, patience, and the willingness to sit with discomfort and uncertainty until clarity emerges.
This is the opposite of what our current technological trajectory offers. AI promises immediate synthesis, instant answers, the ability to generate whatever we can imagine. But Goodall’s work reminds us that some of the most important knowledge comes not from creation but from reception, not from making but from noticing, not from speed but from the slow accumulation of attention over time.
The Gift of Humble Observation
Perhaps what makes Goodall’s approach feel so foreign to us now is its fundamental humility. She didn’t go to Tanzania to demonstrate her intelligence or to impose her theories. She went to learn. She positioned herself not as master but as student. She was willing to be taught by beings that much of her culture considered inferior, unworthy of serious moral consideration.
The Buddhist concept of beginner’s mind captures something of this quality—approaching each moment with openness, without the weight of accumulated assumptions. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” Shunryu Suzuki wrote, “but in the expert’s mind there are few.” Goodall maintained a beginner’s mind for decades, always willing to be surprised, always open to having her understanding deepened or corrected by what she observed.
This kind of humility doesn’t come naturally to us. We’re trained to have opinions, to take positions, to demonstrate our expertise. We’re rewarded for certainty, for quick analysis, for confident assertions. The idea of spending years simply watching and learning, without rushing to conclusions or grand theories, runs counter to almost everything our culture values.
Yet this is precisely what allowed Goodall to see what others had missed. Her willingness to not-know, her patience with ambiguity and complexity, her refusal to force experience into preexisting categories—these created the conditions for genuine discovery.
What We Lose When We Stop Watching
As I reflect on Goodall’s death, I find myself wondering what we’re losing as a culture as we move away from this kind of sustained, humble observation. We’re gaining speed, efficiency, the ability to process vast amounts of information. But are we losing the capacity for the kind of attention that actually transforms understanding?
The ancient wisdom traditions all include practices specifically designed to slow us down, to counter our habitual rushing and grasping. Meditation retreats. Sabbath. Pilgrimage. Vision quests. These practices recognize that transformation requires time and space set apart from ordinary demands and distractions. They create containers for the kind of attention that can’t be hurried.
Goodall’s work was, in a sense, a fifty-year meditation retreat. The forest was her hermitage, the chimpanzees her teachers. What she learned there—about chimps, about science, about the nature of consciousness and community—she could only have learned through that kind of sustained, patient presence.
This raises uncomfortable questions for those of us trying to navigate contemporary life. How do we cultivate this quality of attention when everything around us pushes toward speed and superficiality? How do we resist the pressure to have immediate opinions, quick takes, confident assertions about things we’ve barely begun to understand? How do we create space for the kind of watching that might actually change us?
I don’t have simple answers, but I keep returning to something fundamental in Goodall’s example: she trusted that watching carefully was worth doing. She believed that chimpanzees had something to teach, and that the teaching would only come through patient attention. She was willing to spend years in this practice, even when the results weren’t immediately apparent, even when her methods were questioned.
The Sacred in the Ordinary
There’s a moment Goodall describes in her writings that has always stayed with me. After months of the chimps fleeing at her approach, one day an adult male she’d named David Greybeard allowed her to sit near him. She slowly extended her hand, offering a palm nut. He looked at her, took the nut, dropped it, then gently squeezed her hand. Not to take food, just to connect. Just to say, perhaps, “I see you. We are not so different.”
This gesture of recognition across species—it’s what the mystics speak of when they talk about seeing the divine in all things, about the dissolution of artificial boundaries between self and other. Brother Lawrence practiced “the presence of God” while washing dishes. Goodall practiced the presence of the chimp while sitting in the forest. Both were engaged in the same fundamental work: learning to see what’s actually there, rather than what we expect or need to see.
The Celtic Christians had a beautiful phrase for this: thin places, locations where the boundary between the sacred and ordinary becomes permeable. But perhaps anywhere can become a thin place if we bring the right quality of attention to it. Goodall’s forest was a thin place. Your backyard could be one too. The question is whether we’re willing to stay long enough, watch carefully enough, to discover what wants to be revealed.
Choosing to Watch
In the end, what moves me most about Jane Goodall’s life is how it embodies a choice that’s available to each of us, in every moment: the choice to truly watch, to be present with what is, rather than rushing past toward what we want or fear or expect. This isn’t passive. It’s one of the most active, engaged things a person can do—to give themselves fully to the present moment, to what’s actually happening rather than to their ideas about what should be happening.
The ancient wisdom keepers knew this. The Buddha sat under the bodhi tree and watched his own mind until understanding arose. Desert monastics watched their thoughts and impulses with patient attention until they understood the mechanics of suffering and liberation. Taoist sages watched the natural world until they could move in harmony with its rhythms.
Goodall watched chimpanzees and discovered that the boundaries we’d drawn between human and animal, between us and them, were far more permeable than we’d imagined. She discovered that tool use wasn’t uniquely human, that warfare wasn’t uniquely human, that compassion and grief and complex social structures weren’t uniquely human. In doing so, she didn’t diminish humanity—she expanded it, revealed us as part of a larger community of conscious beings navigating existence with all its challenges and possibilities.
We live now in an age that often feels like it’s coming apart, where the old stories no longer hold and new ones haven’t yet taken stable shape. We face crises—ecological, social, spiritual—that demand new ways of seeing and being. Perhaps part of what we need is the practice Goodall embodied: the willingness to watch carefully, to let our understanding be changed by what we witness, to sit with complexity and uncertainty until clarity emerges not from our projections but from reality itself.
The wisdom is still there, still speaking through the natural world, through each other, through the present moment if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. But it requires from us what it required from Jane Goodall: patience, humility, and the radical act of truly paying attention. It requires us to become students again, to approach the world with the openness of someone who knows there’s always more to learn, always deeper to see.
As I sit with the news of her death, I find myself grateful for the gift of her example, for the reminder that one life given to careful observation can change how we all see. And I find myself wondering: What am I watching? What am I really seeing? What might be revealed if I could bring even a fraction of that quality of attention to my own life, my own moment, my own small patch of this vast and mysterious world?
These are the questions Goodall’s life leaves us with. Not answers, but invitations. Not certainties, but openings. Not the end of inquiry, but its beginning, again and always—this sacred, necessary practice of learning to watch, to see, to be present with what is. In a world of artificial seeing and instant synthesis, perhaps this is the most countercultural, revolutionary act available to us: the simple, patient, transformative practice of paying attention.