By way of Bitch, PhD I came across this essay by Ken McLeod titled “Awake.” He talks about the Buddhist conception of death as something completely, utterly inseparable from life – and not its opposite but its end. And about how we [Westerners, US culture specifically] just don’t get it until some accident or disaster jolts us into awareness of death’s ubiquitous presence. That awareness is essential to creativity, and to living fully. The perils of ignoring death on a visceral level, not feeling it, are dire:
[T]o ignore or deny death results in an incomplete and unbalanced relationship with life. You cannot know life fully. Instead, you take what is transitory—money, fame, power, relationship— to be real and base your life on achieving what cannot last—happiness, gain, fame, and respect. When you base life on things that can be taken away from you, you give power over your life to anyone who can take those things away. You become dependent on others and on society for a sense of well-being. You give your life away to others and what others deem to be important.
But what of those others whom I deem to be important? Family, colleagues, friends? From the exercises McLeod presents in his paper, ones designed to make you starkly face death in all its alone-ness and re-arranging of priorities and inevitability for each of us personally, it would seem that other people ultimately shouldn’t be given any agency in one’s (my) happiness.
This is a difficult lesson to learn. I’m a social animal, and furthermore, my personal insecurities have for most of my life been fed pretty explicitly by others’ reactions to me. In particular, praise or approval by people whose opinions I value feel so good that they’re addictive, and produce withdrawal when they’re, well, withdrawn (or even when I perceive them to be withdrawn). This is a lesson I am learning repeatedly these days, what with the way the ground keeps getting knocked out from beneath my feet (yes, still – and this isn’t an entirely negative thing, although unpleasant). Striking a balance between being open and loving with people and not depending on them for anything at all is… tricky. Yet it seems that this is where I’m headed, both by forced choice and by feeling that this is the right direction.
Two categories of interaction have fed my energy lately: with young children, and with my cats. Things are so much simpler with them: their needs are well-defined and relatively few, they interact without much ambiguity, and they find contentment in the moment in a way few adults do. Add McLeod’s death-facing exercises to the daily mix, and maybe letting go – over and over and over again – will become easier. There’s a lot to be said for having a beginner’s mind, which concept seems to include having no preconceptions about other people’s actions and how they may or may not reflect on me.
Anyway, McLeod’s entire essay is well worth reading. But if nothing else, since you’re already here, have one of the exercises – the one Dr. Bitch liked too when she saw it printed in a magazine:
Wherever you are when you read this, stop reading right now. Look around you. Note everything that you see, hear or touch. Imagine that you are going to die in the next minute. You have no time to make any phone calls or to say anything to anyone. This is it. You are going to die. […]
Death casts a different light on life. The more fully you relate to death, the more fully you relate to life. You are clearer about what is and isn’t important, what can and cannot be done, what is and isn’t meaningful. Increasingly, you look below the surface of things and see what really matters. Social prescriptions and promises of success and security ring hollow. Conventional definitions of success and failure—happiness and unhappiness, gain and loss, fame and obscurity, respect and disdain—lose their hold. You stop following convention for convention’s sake or tradition for tradition’s sake. In the end, you may do many of the same things, but you do them for different, more personal, reasons. Each action, each meeting, each word you say comes not from what you’ve been told to believe or do, but from a personal connection to life.
Incidentally, this train of thought is having an unexpectedly helpful effect on dealing with the seasonal depression that is very much here again. For the first time since… 2002, I think, I feel a paradoxical agency in letting go. Not that I’m always successful at it, but practice, right?
