Are you living your life?

Living Life

“If you realize that you don’t have that many more years to live and if you live your life as if you actually only had a day left, then the sense of impermanence heightens that feeling of preciousness and gratitude.”

                                                                        Pema Chodron, Buddhist Nun

“In essence, if blessed, some event or lack of event undoes us until we are broken open into honest living.”

                                                                        Mark Nepo, Poet and Philosopher

            Here’s a classic spiritual question:  If you knew that you had only one week to live, or one day, how would you spend it?  This question loomed large in my world four years ago when my mother lay dying, the final member of my original family to do so.  I sat beside her bed for long hours, stitching a small wall hanging.  She did not want to talk about dying or much of anything else, so it was a quiet time.  I had the opportunity to do a lot of thinking and proximity to death has a way of sharpening the mind, honing the senses.  Mother was twenty-three years old when I was born---which meant that in a mere twenty-three years, I might be where she was.  I realized there were many things I wanted to do before then; things I had been putting off for lack of time that now seemed imperative.  I felt, for the first time, the pressure of time shortened and knew I had better get busy.

            If we are lucky, or ‘blessed,’ as Mark Nepo puts it, something will happen in our lives that stops us in our tracks, something that forces us to acknowledge that time is precious and limited.  If we are trudging through our days, like hamsters on a wheel, we’d better wake up and claim time for whatever our hearts are yearning to do.  According to Pema Chodron, “Life is very brief.  Even if you live to be a hundred, it’s very brief.” 

            So what if you aren’t in a position to throw off the responsibilities of making a living and run off to Bali to live out your days in bliss?  What can you do to make every day count?  Diane Ackerman says this:

            “…[since] we may go out like a candle flame…it probably doesn’t matter that we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a non-stop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly…get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance…or light up with wonder like the children we all are.”

            We can stop worrying about making fools of ourselves and instead, throw open the doors to each new experience.  We can do something every day simply because it brings us life, it gives us joy.  It doesn’t have to be all day long.  It could be just fifteen minutes.  Living life wide open may be risky, but not as risky as coming to the end of the line and realizing that you haven’t lived at all. 

                                                                        Living the faith,

                                                                        Jane