Tuesday, January 30, 2007The StillnessA good friend of mine is dying. I'll tell you who it is in a moment.There are all sorts of ways to approach the end of our time on the planet. In some ways this friend of mine has been granted a new perspective on life, because she has a sense of how it's going to happen and when. She is granted a different sense of the big picture becuase, tragically, it's not that big anymore. Now just being able to see how long you have to live is not in itself a happy thought. What I'm talking about is more about the consciousness that comes with a pure concentration of life. This is the frozen OJ right out of the can. The need and desire to dilute, to save it for later, is removed. We were talking the other day and I came up with some thoughts about how to create an exit strategy that's meaningful. I certainly don't have it all together yet, but here is some of what I wanted to say to her as we wrestled with this issue: It may be time to face the beast. Whatever it is that you've been avoiding your whole life, now's the time to quit avoiding it. Whether it's bad relationships or a sense of self worth or getting in touch with the cosmic life force -- putting off that reconciliation a whole lot longer means you might just miss it. You may just die without having a sense of profound peace within your body, or connection with the cosmos or knowing how much you are truly loved. What if you've been wrong? What if avoiding turns out to have been more difficult than dealing directly? Wouldn't that be a bummer. As hard as it may feel to turn and face the beast of your demons... you've done the avoidance thing for the vast majority of your life and it's probably not worked all that well. What's the harm in trying another approach? I mean, the downside is going to happen anyway, right? You're dying. So... try doing the hard stuff and maybe you'll find out that it's easier than you thought. Maybe you'll find out that it's easier than not doing the hard stuff. If you don't, you risk that moment on the last day where you wonder whether all that shucking and jiving away from your problems was really worth the hassle. And if you do... who knows? Maybe your body will hurt less, maybe it will relax a bit more, maybe all the effort of avoiding can now go into the effort of healing. Try to be silent. I realized something so ridiculously profound tonight that it may be just obvious to everyone on the planet: It's really deep in our human nature to keep the noise level up. Really deep. As any of you who've done any meditation know, it's nearly impossible to shut the brain up for more than a few glorious, freeing, lighter-than-air moments. Our brains hate to shut up. Our brains long for supremacy in their chatter. Our brains are terrified of silence. And they will support an infinite variety of co-conspirators in their campaign to keep the distractions up to a maximum. Look at television. And advertisements. Radio. Music. Movies. iPods. PSPs. Nintendo DSs. Video games. Online computer games. DVD players in cars. Cell phones that play music and games and ring tones and take pictures. I could fill pages with this stuff. But you get the point: with the exception of the yoga industry, and maybe the national park service, our society is entirely founded on the need and love of luring ourselves away from silence. We love and need and insist on distracting ourselves. I promised I would tell you who was dying, so I will. It's us. It's you. And it's me. And it's my friend who has cancer. And my other friend who has cancer. And your friend who has cancer. It's my dog who is licking my foot at the moment. And it's our children. It's unbearable. Every bit of it is too painful to comprehend. Distractions such as poetry and running mountain water and occasional trips to Paris provide much-needed balm for the soul. We all need to buffer some of it or we'd go mad. So the distractions help, until they overwhelm. But gratitude helps infinitely more. And silence to sort it all out is not only precious but essential. We are all dying. So maybe let's go a bit more about our business knowing that each slice of our life is precious and delectable, craving to be savored with mindfulness and gratitude. We don't need to get morbid, we don't need to get more sad than necessary, but maybe we can use this consciousness as an excuse to turn off the chatter and listen to the songs of the stars for a few moments. Since we're all going to stamp our passports with the Infinite as our next port of call, maybe we can shut up the noise long enough to get an inkling of what's going on out there. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 9:29 PM  
Comments: Yes! forgiveness is the best exit strategy..What happens in life, is 10% based on facts and real stuff and the 90% of it, is our own stories about that fact, our own judgments and/or misjudgments. Besides, who said that the "death" is the end of the road? we judge death by our limited logic...What if death was a beginning of something new somewhere else? what if, the "earth" is a training camp for another life? we just don't know.. # posted by  Frieda : 9:41 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home
|
