Living And Dying

This has been the best year I have had in a while. By no means it has been the easiest. It has been incredibly tough. A lot of times the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel” seemed to be more of a fading myth than an attainable aspect of life. There is also the incredible frustration of being aware of the long list of things that needs to be set right. Yet, knowledge and awareness is one thing, acting on it is another and that gap is often found widening than narrowing.

The darkest of our hours bring forth the truest of our qualities. The lofty and the noble are ideals that find an easy home in days of light. Once darkness falls, it lends a feeling of being lost and homeless to us. The world of light becomes a fading memory. We fight what we can’t see and we yearn for what we can’t see. In all of that is hidden the simple fact that none of us are destined to live, nor are we destined to die. Death and birth are out of our control, but living and dying are choices we make.

The choices become considerably vexing when they go against what I am naturally inclined to do. Should I not just go with the flow? Should I ignore my instincts? Should I ignore what I am tells me about where I am and what is going on? All those questions answered in the negative assumes that I am the best positioned, in a given situation, to know and analyze best that situation. And I did answer those questions in the negative all my life. Fortunately, life was smarter than me to let me have my way on that for too long.

Being sent kicking and screaming down that road I did not like going on, to my utter surprise, I found the outcome to be quite to my liking. Where I thought I had little space to change I found space in plenty. In what I thought I would not find much to like, I found much to my liking. In what I thought I could not trust, I found plenty to trust. Where I thought I would not be able to survive without being able to control almost anything, I found myself thriving without having a modicum of control over the present or the outcome.

Being proven wrong was never so good, but I had to be open to being proven wrong for it to happen. Most of our lives are spent clawing on to the sense of who we are, what we are and what we feel. We often conflate what we feel at a given point in time to what we are and who we are. We are not even half as amenable to being proven wrong or being changed as we often urge others around us to do. We create these imaginary forts, walls and standards to protect ourselves, while life does not give a hoot. What hits you always hits you as hard as it can hit you. Nothing prevents that.

The harder I have held on to something, the more violently that something was taken away from me. I feel like a seafarer who found a different island from the one he was actually looking for. If you cannot live with the inevitability of an uncertain outcome it is hard to fully enjoy the journey of life. We may or may not get where we want to. We may lose everything we love along the way. We may err, we may experience much harshness and be unkind to many. Yet, living or dying is a choice that is far beyond all of that. And we have to choose wisely.