230902 - Leaving

Last evening today. I don’t know quite how to feel. I’m always a bit anxious around moving. After all this time, still. It’s been an experience, being here. First time I’m properly alone in maybe ever. It feels weird, just being okay, y’know? I haven’t really felt the need to do, or be, anything. Haven’t really interacted with people, haven’t really explored, haven’t really done what you “really must do when you’re there.” I’ve had a great time just with myself, my books, and well, my phone time charts tell me of that other part. Why I’m leaving. Why I’m filled with anticipation. Vashisht has been different from all the other places. It feels like somewhere I could settle down for a while, get deep into my own practice and studies. It’s calm, devoid of activity. In just 2 weeks I found a routine, although it’s been a lazy one. The rest was needed. The introspection, most of all. It’s been 3 months and I’ve yet to have time to even process the first place I was in, China. I cried when I left. It felt like home. The people.. Well, coming from my life in Sweden it was an awakening. And it’s not just China; every place has touched me. Every interaction, every moment. They reside somewhere inside; this I know. Every time I leave is an honest goodbye. Is an appreciation of what has been. Most of all, is a reminder of Anitya. Impermanence. There’s no way not to feel it when you’re traveling. Every moment is imbued with its own destruction. Every person you meet - the impermanence makes it that more Real. It’s easy to lose yourself in its ephemerality, to run away, to avoid the deeper connections in a shoppping mall of places, people, happenings. To always live in tomorrow. And I can’t even blame those who do. Because letting yourself feel how transitory it all is, letting yourself feel how much more intense that makes all of it, letting yourself acknowledge that tomorrow it might not be. Well. It teaches you life. It teaches you death. “Let’s see how long this lasts”. And it doesn’t matter how much I want it to stay. It doesn’t matter how much I want it to leave. My opinions only serve to cloud that which is, to deny its existence. But letting that go is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Lately I’ve been imagining, when laying in bed, that the mattress would open up and I’d fall down into an infinite void. Feeling that feeling - of falling. Or when meditating, that my body dissipates, all the atoms that make up who I am dispersing out into space. That feeling, too. Letting go. Acknowledging that anything else is delusion. Grasping does not make things stay the same. It’s been helping, too. The practice makes it easier. But on days like this, I don’t know if it’s what I really want. Accepting emptiness.. Why can’t I just deny it like the rest of them? My acceptance is what scares me the most. Slowly, the walls are fading. When all I’m left with is the void, who will hear me scream?