I Am About

學佛，講佛

A friend sent this to me two years ago

"On an ancient wall in China
A brooding Buddha blinks
Deeply graven is the message
- It is later than you think -
The clock of life is wound but once
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hand will stop
At late or early hour
Now is all the time you own
The past a golden link
Go cruising now my brother
It is later than you think."
(Author unknown)

Circus

"Learning to live is learning to let go."
-Tibetan Book of Living & Dying

Metaphorically Speaking

It's really insightful these days to be doing "nothing" and to be "nothing" for once. The world is indeed proceeding along its merry way, and I can just enjoy and be a part of it. I went to high school in a school district that is somewhat TigerMom-esque, I suppose. I realized that I'm so used to having people size me up by my GPA/test scores/resume, that it's really odd for me to comprehend that people can be liked as they are, for who they are, and not what they do. I think deep down that's all we want though, and working for all that frilly resume stuff is just for the sake of a little more happiness, isn't it? Things go a little haywire when the frilly resume stuff becomes the goal in and of itself though, and the bigger picture is forgotten, or worse, denied to exist. It's insightful to see who sticks around through the thick and the thin too. In fact, part of me is so glad that this is all happening, because it is so clear to me now who is a true friend, and so apparent to me how much my immediate family members love and care for me at the end of the day, all former grudges and resentments set aside. I remember in college when I'd get a bunch of phone calls right before a problem set was due or before the day of a midterm. It's so unnecessary. Real friends are hard to come by.

Part of me is nervous about my impending travels, but part of me is excited!! This will be an opportunity to experiment a little with the concepts I've been toying with these past years, such as "living in the present"! I have been reflecting on how traveling is a metaphor for life. To paraphrase Don Draper from "Mad Men" (the TV show I'm currently catching up on), you're born alone and you die alone, and a bunch of rules are dropped on you along the way to make you forget that fact. Life is about the journey and not the destination, hm? After all, if the destination was the point, we might as well all go take savasana (corpse pose) now. In terms of productivity, traveling outwardly appears like one of the most frivolous things a person can do! You leave home with bare necessities, shuttle around the world, walk around everywhere, and what have you got to show for it? A much subdued bank account balance, materially speaking. Oh and maybe some cheap souvenirs (an attempt in vain to hold onto a transient experience). But in a way that's kind of how life is. You're born, you do some stuff on Earth, and then it's all over. You can't even bring any souvenirs with you.

To quote Guruji: "Why fear?"

Wake Up

And he made it clear that he would rather take his life than to be held by filial duty to go on in ignorance.

quote from "Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha," by Jack Kerouac

Life

Excerpt from "The Elegance of the Hedgehog," after a retirement home visit by a precocious thirteen-year-old and her family to see her paternal grandmother:

On the contrary, we absolutely mustn't forget it. We mustn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where's the joy in these final hours that they ought to be making the most of? They're spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty. Colombe thinks you can 'hurry up and forget' because it all seems so very far away to her, the prospect of old age, as if it were never going to happen to her. But just by observing the adults around me I understood very early on that life goes by in no time at all, yet they're always in such a hurry, so stressed out by deadlines, so eager for now that they needn't think about tomorrow...But if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, and when you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?

So, we mustn't forget any of this, absolutely not. We have to live with the certainty that we'll get old and that it won't look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it's not that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there's a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.

That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.