Life and death, our constant companions.

I belong to a small group of folks who meet one early morning each week to pray and share together. To give some structure to our sharing we are using a book of meditations built around the writings of Thomas Merton, the American monk who was one of the major spiritual writers of the 20th century. One of the additional writings is by a Tibetan Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron. I wanted to share some of the excerpt because I feel it to be so apt for our modern time. It is from her book: When Things Fall Apart.*

We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we're going to have an experience we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head.... The essence of life is that it's challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter.
  

Life and death are always with us.

This excerpt says something that has been on my mind for quite a while. I see around me - and maybe there is something of this in me too - such a fear of suffering and aging and death (they are all related I think) that we are spending huge amounts of time and money to overcome this. But I think that Pema Chodron is saying, try as we may, we can't do that. 

Life is full of fragility and vulnerability; life and death, and that can be a gift or it can be destructive. We get to choose how we will view these aspects of being alive, we don't get to avoid them.

*Chodron, Pema: When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Boston, Shambhala, 1997.