Dying Practice - A Meditation
This will sound weird. I feel like I am dying, and this is a good thing.
Explanation please, Marc.
Preparing for a year overseas is like engaging a death you see ahead, coming your way, in your lane, on your tracks. Subscriptions to end, banking details, house-cleanings, getting rid of the unnecessary, the good-byes (the long ones are still hard!), even the will that needs an update. "Getting your affairs in order" is the euphemism.
I love it. This is good spiritual practice for a control-freak. All this contingency planning, imposing your last will and testament on the future, finally gives way to how I have no real control. After the panic attack subsides, I relish this feeling of being out of control (The fool who persists in his folly will become wise. - William Blake). I the caterpillar inch up one blade of grass, to have that blade bend over as I reach for the next. Leaving. Anticipating. What exactly can one leave behind, if anything? When was the last time my careful reaching-planning actually played out?
Into which world do I really live? Invest? Giving up so much in the here-now, for what feels like a mostly-planned-out year ahead ... it feels like a spiritual practice. This practice of giving up, of losing control - voluntarily - feels so right. Why?
"Sometimes I feel like I'm dying." Letting loose. Letting go. All my linear wrenches so carefully oiled and maintained in my toolbox hardly fit the spiral bolts a-coming.
The dandelion seed lets go, knowing only about clinging; how can it know the ride ahead? Why would it let go?
Saint G.K. Chesterton has the last idea: It is a paradox. One confronts death honestly only by continually stepping within an inch of it, combining a strong desire for life with a "strange carelessness" about dying. (From his book Orthodoxy, 1909)
This is not suicide, worry not! Drink in life like water, drink of death like wine may be the only way to prevent the many forms suicide takes.
May I be pictured with a glass in both hands?
But Marc, it must be liberating to "die" to all that baggage you left behind...kind of like being re-born, eh? with a lighter load. I envy your adventure and will enjoy vicariously seeing Ewha and environs through your fresh eyes. It is not the place I recall some 40 years ago. bon chance!
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