Library catalog card, oil pastels. Click to purchase.
I recently went to a New Year ceremony with a group of friends, where the focus was on things we were ready to let go. Every person in the group expressed a variation of fear.
Really, what else is there? All fear is a fear of death. It is the only fear.
We sat there with candles in our hands, and held in our minds those things we wanted to leave behind. One by one we gave voice to those fears, and floated the candle in a pool of water where it would eventually extinguish.
For me, it's time to stop being afraid of being seen. It is a fear that has plagued me for years, impacting my writing and work and art and how I engage with community. And the fear is absurd, because death is the only thing we all have in common.
This isn't me preaching: I sure don't have all this (or anything) figured out. There is a Buddhist meditation "maraṇasati" where you visualize your own corpse in different stages of decomposition. I've tried to do this, but often forget what I look like.
But I am absolutely certain that if I--we--you--everyone--can get more comfortable with the idea of death and impermanence then a lot of other comfort will follow.
Our ideas of Past and Future are mostly wrong. Neither exists. Our ideas of Self are mostly wrong, too. It exists, but not the way we often think and it doesn’t loom nearly so large as we believe.
Yet humans spend most of their time thinking about those very things.
There is only now. This moment, stretched out for eternity. And throughout our entire lives, we’ll just catch a glimpse.
