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Today’s topic is a topic we all think about while doing our best not to think about it. The topic is death. And how we think about death changes depending upon whether we are thinking about dying ourselves, or about losing the people we love. But whichever side of the coin we take here, death is really an ever present reality for us, and it is so whether we are thinking about it or not, it is always announcing itself – in the background, on the news, in the stories we hear about the lives of the others, in our concerns about our own health, in the attention we pay when crossing the streets. If you observe yourself closely, you’ll see that you spend a fair amount of energy each day trying not to die. And as has long been noted by philosophers, and contemplatives, and poets - death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend our lives doing. Just take a moment to reflect on how you’ve spent your day so far – the kinds of things that captured your attention, the things that you’ve been genuinely worried about. Think of the last argument you had with your spouse. Think of the last hour you spent on the social media. Over the last few days I’ve been spending an unordinary amount of time trying to find a new font for my podcast. This has literally absorbed hours of my time. So, if you had stopped me at any point in my last 48 hours and asked me what I’m up to, what really concerns me, what deep problem I’m attempting to solve – the solution to which seems most likely to bring order to the chaos in my corner of the universe – the honest answer would’ve been: I’m looking for a font. Now, I’m not saying the everything we do has to be profound in every moment (means, sometimes, we just to have find a font!) but contemplating the brevity of life brings some perspective to how we use our attention. It’s not so much what we pay our attention to, it’s the quality of attention, it’s how we feel while doing it. If you need to spend the next hour looking for a font, you might as well enjoy it, because the truth is non of us know how much time we have in this life, and taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present, or at least it can, and it can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things! When you take something like road-rage – this is probably the quintessential example of misspent energy! You are behind the wheel of your car and somebody does something erratic, or they are probably just driving more slowly than you want, and you find yourself getting angry. Now, I would submit to you that that kind of thing is impossible if you are being mindful of the shortness of life, if you are aware that you are going to die and the other person is going to die, and that you are both going to lose everyone you love, and you don’t know when! You’ve got this moment of life – this beautiful moment! This moment where your consciousness is bright, where it’s not dimmed by morphine - in the hospital – on your last day among the living! And the sun is out! Or, it’s raining! Both are beautiful! And your spouse is alive! And your children are alive! And you’re driving! And you’re not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. You’re just running an errand! And, that person in front of you who you’ll never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about, but if you could know them you would recognise how impressively similar to your own they are, is just driving slow! This is your life. The only one you got! And you’ll never get this moment back again! And, you don’t know how many more moments you have. No matter many how many times you do something, there will come a day when you’ll do it for the last time. You’ve had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them - in a way that they feel it, and in a way that you feel it – and you’ve missed most of them, and you don’t know how many more you are going to get. You’ve got this next interaction with another human being to make the world a marginally better place. You’ve got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence! So why not relax and enjoy your life? Really relax! Even in the midst of struggle, even while doing hard work, even under uncertainty. You are in a game right now, and you can’t see the clock, and so you don’t know how much time you’ve left. And yet you’re free to make the game as interesting as possible! You can even change the rules! You can discover new games that no one has thought of yet! You can make games that used to be impossible – suddenly possible, and get others to play them with you! You can, literally, build a rocket to go to Mars, so that you can start a colony there. I, actually, know people who will spend some part of today doing that! But, whatever you do, however seemingly ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life, and an awareness of death is the doorway into that way of being in the world.
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Extracted from - (Timespan - 0:00 to 7:05) -
Shifting the blog to the Wordpress CMS.
Mobile apps for blogger are, a bit, too, dissapointing!
>>Here<<
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