20240225 - 12:22
Who am I? The question keeps staring me in the face, expectantly, demanding. Yesterday I answered my friend; the question cannot be answered as such. It has to be lived, with every breath, with every action, every moment unfolding. In presence we find ourselves: Being. Flowing; from Past to Future, we are within the world, a part of it. Historical creatures. Yet, at every moment, with every breath, we can stop. We can choose. The act of choice, of not perpetuating the past in an habitual way, but of choosing to be; this is where we find the answer. I am. This is my blessing. I am blessed to be alive. I am blessed to be aware of the fact of being alive; of reflexiveness. Conscious of the act of consciousness.
I wake up in the morning, I look around. I sigh, I smile. These last few days I’ve been overwhelmed with the necessity of action. So many hours in a day that needs to be filled. Slowly, I recognize. I ask. For what? A reminder hangs next to my bedroom window. “Death awaits.” The memories are still fluttering in my mind, the chants of yesterday. “Effort is the duty of today, even tomorrow death may come..” I have this tune stuck in my head, a favorite song of mine.
"You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today,
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you,
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun."
There’s a lot of this flowing around me lately that’s making me anxious to spend my days like this: recovering, resting, healing. Never once did I stop to reflect on what it means. “Effort”, I took for granted as Right effort, as in, the Noble Eightfold Path. Death awaits, surely. It’s been so much of this theme that I’ve started more concretely on the idea of a tattoo along these lines. But, really, what does it mean? To not “waste time”? Even taken in a Buddhist conception, which, lately I’m kind of struggling with the “being a buddhist” part of me, what does “Right effort” mean? Practicing for the uprooting of Dukkha, for liberation. How? What am I supposed to be doing? According to whom? What’s it all about, this idea of “making every day count?” It’s not that I am questioning the thing itself, well, maybe, but concretely, what makes a day count? What makes it good?
I remember this verse that really stuck with me that I read about 6 months back. It’s the last page of the book “The Left Hand of God”, and he recites his morning and evening practices, something he does every day when he wakes up and when he goes to bed. When he wakes up, he says,
“First, I remember that I’m going to die. This gives urgency to the way I will live that day.”
and then, going to bed, he asks himself three questions:
Have I lived?
Have I laughed?
Have I loved?
I used to take these 3 questions quite at face-value. They symbolized, for me, worthy undertakings, things that were worth doing. That is to say, things that led to these three things, were things that made a day “valuable.” They reflected, and answered for me, what to do. But as I’ve come to realize, that is not actually the case. I’ve talked about it a lot with Hanna, but it hasn’t quite made it through I suppose. How it’s never about what we do, but how we do it, which is another way to say who we are.
The living part can be recognized by spiritual practice, connecting to that part of us that live. Because being alive, in the ordinary sense, and recognizing that we are, and by doing so actually living, is, I think, the core of all spiritual practice. Not only am I alive, I am aware of being alive as such. I am aware of having a body, of breathing, of having thoughts. The laughing, the loving, these are fruitful ways to relate to the world and all its happenings. They are themes, of sort, to our being-in-the-world. With humour and love.
The loving part might be expanded; these days I tend to look at it through the lense of the Brahmaviharas:
Metta, Karuna, Mudita, Uppekha.
Friendliness (loving-kindness), Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, Equanimity.
These are, I think, facets of love. All to be practiced, to be understood and realized, through action. Precisely in the way we relate to the world we come to understand them, and thus deepen their qualities within ourselves.
The urgency that the invocation of Death summons is, thus viewed, more subtle than at first glance. It is problematic if not looked into properly because it brings forth a sense of hurry. Like there’s somewhere to get, and we are wasting our time not aware of the fact that Death is coming. Rather, we can allow the prevalence of Death in our life to bring forth quite a different sensation. We can let it imbue us with the urgency, not to do, but to be. To let every moment unfold, to be aware of its blessing precisely because tomorrow, it might not. The effort we summon is not to do anything at all, in fact, but to not let ourselves slip away; to undiscriminately let every moment hold its full weight. I am alive. Having been aware of the fact for another day, is having lived for yet one more day. Living thus, I go to sleep today and I wake up tomorrow. Neglecting, I find myself somewhere else, perhaps months apart. To be alive, even for a single day. What a blessing!
…And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you…