Holding On To Letting Go
After a long night, my dying cat left that morning. What made the proceedings more than a personal tragedy, as well as an acute teaching, was the strength with which this little guy held on to life, and then very naturally held on firmly to letting go of that life.
In contrast, I doubted, cried, wrote, and tried to fix any anything I could. I kept trying to make it better, to make it perfect, to have a Buddhist approach, a cat’s approach, the right angle on the madness of dissolution. But, in the end, he did what he needed to do. Death is a natural thing. Its not show biz. It doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact its a mess. It always ends strangely with lots of unresolved angles tangled in the web of our need to understand. Unsettled by waves of guilt and grief, welling deep in the body from an ancient past, my mind continually tried to find refuge in reason and meaning. But, there is no reason to dying. And, perhaps, there is no meaning to life. Meanings are are concepts and concepts, in the best case, can lead us to water. They can’t make us drink. Drinking is an action and an experience. There is no need to analyze it. The natural things of life simply are as they are. To add significance to the actual is to proclaim our importance as beings above nature. As though through our limited experience (and, yes, compared to the complete experience of the universe, even the sage among us are limited) we can somehow reduce and define reality into our conceptual frames. To add meaning to experience is like adding whipped cream to a perfectly cooked roast. It helps define it as food, perhaps, but it only masks its flavor, misses the point and creates distance from the experience.
Ideas are not experience. They are our way of controlling the experiences of life. The more frightened we are, the more we try and label, compartmentalize, understand. When we are frightened, we might take refuge in drugs, alcohol, sex or mindless activities. But, conceptualizing is masking the experience of painful situations just as much as a tub of ice cream. Except, that with ice cream, we know that we’re not helping anything. We know we’re hiding out in the momentary oblivion of sensory immersion and serotonin overload. We also know that reality is there waiting, when the crash occurs.
Concepts are a cagy refuge. They sometimes offer the illusion that we are helping to clarify things, that we are working things out or – in the case of conversations – downloading the pain to someone else. But, we are only running from the direct experience of pain, boredom or confusion, leaving the experience unresolved and unknown. Concepts, ideas and conversation may bring us to the precipice. But, at some point, to be ion the experience, is to we simply step in to it. There is just that.
In the case of death, the good news is, its force is greater than our thinking, resistance, clinging or trying to make a perfect exit. A process that has been happening for a long time, simply proceeds apace. The elements begin to dissolve. The body relaxes into the earth and the mind defuses its in physical, emotional and conceptual mooring.
After this night of turmoil, Huxley finally asserted his right to die his way, in the time he needed. At one point, he reached out for Jen, and in a heartbreaking moment of yearning, extended his paw, looked to her with that focused love and admiration, that was his way, and then relaxed and let go. The doctor came soon after to close the deal with two injections that rendered his already body, completely still. Then there was space. Silence, stillness and space. I sat watching the prayer flags on my porch flutter gently in the wind. There seemed to be a gentle clarity that was not diminished by the sense of loss. There was no need to work anything out, nor try and effect the situation. There just was the empty itself, itself. Only that.
And the gentle movement of the prayer flags in the wind.
We live in liminal times. Our life, in transition between one moment and the next. “Now” is not a noun. Its a verb. A continuum of experience, some known, some unknown and much it frustratingly out of reach. By the time we know it, its gone. To hold to experience until we know it, keeps us from being awake to the next experience. We don’t learn from our mistakes. We learn from our wisdom, and perhaps the only mistake we make, and have ever made, is to not be present.
There are so many moments that would have greatly enriched our lives had we been present for them. It is fruitless, and essentially materialistic, to look back on those moments of supposed juncture and wonder if we had only turned left instead of right. Had we chosen Aeri over Annette, the University over a trade position, the Dharma over the theater. But, this is only a circular masturbatory ritual. We flog ourselves again and again in vicious masochistic loops in order to keep ourselves company after our loss.
If regret is accurate at all, perhaps it would be more fruitful to look back on the places that we simply missed being with what was. The times we abandoned ourselves in a flight of panic. While we have no way of knowing if chocolate would have been better in the long run than vanilla, we can rest assured that we have missed entire junctures of our life. Rather than try and imagine how a change would have made everything perfect, we could look back and see how perfect it would have been to have actually been there. Of course, even that requires us to not be present now. So, the most fruitful way to work with the of presence of mind, is to train the mind to be present. And the best way to do that, is now. Now is the perfect time to be present.
Meditation is training the mind choose to let go of fixation and preoccupation, and rest in the present. However, meditation is not about holding ourselves there, but returning to the present, as though we were navigating a ship. Brining it back to the middle path, tacking it gently against the karmic streams that lead us into the weeds of fixation. holding on to the practice of letting go. Each time we let goof an idea, a concept, a reason we release ourselves into the stream of what is. Each time we let go, we naturally fall back into experiencing our life.
We live in liminal times. The ground is changing below us. Reference points that have held the world entrenched are loosening. We are changing faster than ever. Saying good bye is saying hello. I miss my little buddy. But, more than that I miss that I may have been more present in our experience together, and have appreciated him more. This is a common feeling in my life. I wish I had been there for more of it. And, so if there is a resolution here, it is to let go of the pain, the past, the references of doubt and confusion, so that I can participate more completely in what’s here. Life is a gift. And we can open the present and receive that gift. Or, we can continue to explain what that experience would be should we actually have it.
Some teachers, traditions, and guides point to a wordless state of knowing. A place where wisdom just is. A place of knowing rather than thinking about knowing. I have a friend who is a midwife in the Richmond area. Her philosophy is that birth is a natural occurrence. It doesn’t need the intellect. It doesn’t need instruction. It is a process that has been going for as long as humans have been here. The best we can do to support the process is protect the space, so that the event can happen naturally. The same is true of death. It is a natural process. And, as a hospice worker, Buddhist Chaplain and a meditation instructor with deathbed experience, I know this. Interestingly, I could not hold that seat when triggered by a being close to me. Then I saw only the injustice of it and the heartbreaking sadness of Huxley reaching out and one by one missing connections to hold on to life. And so I tried to help. But there is no holding on to life. There is only holding on to letting go and coming back to letting go over and over.
So, holding on to letting go, implies that there are things to open to, and places to let go. It is always appropriate to let go. In fact, the practice is to let go, continually. But, this is not a negation of anything. It is opening to what is actually there. There is an insistent consistency to our life stream, which connects life to death and death to life. And then there are all the things we think about that, which are frequently helpful, sometimes harmful, but always temporary. Problems arise when these thoughts, dogmas and ideas are held on to so tightly, they try corral our life stream. In this way, we hold on to the beliefs and let go of our connection to the actual experience of living. We hold on to concepts and let go of of knowing. Solidifying our concepts against the flow of experience creates an ontological dissonance that manifests as tension and resistance in our lives. This is very sad, as it replaces personal experience with what other people have told us, and creates a sense of unease in our life. This is not to demonize concepts. In fact, we can gain great value from this process of mind, by letting go of them, and allowing them to re-arise. In this way, the concepts that arise spontaneously may be a more accurate depiction of what is happening. Concepts that have been held on to for years defy the basic principle of nature: that everything changes. Ironically, it seems that the longer we’ve had an idea, the more real it must be. But, if everything changes, it would seem an idea we’ve had for a long time has LESS validity than an insight we glean from being present in the moment.
Concepts may be helpful signposts, but signposts are not the destination. So we acknowledge them, perhaps even weight them against learned experience, but, at some point, move back into the flow of actual experience.
Meditation is a remedial effort to realign the mind to a truer nature in actual experience. We recognize thoughts, and acknowledging them as such, release our grip on them, and return to the stream of the present. In time, we train the mind to follow, or hold to, its deeper and more natural orientation. In this way, we navigate our stream to its most true direction. If we can do that, perhaps we can be present for the moments of connection, however brief and however rare that make our life truthful. I believe it is these moments that make us awake. These connections slowly puncture the myths in which we’ve become ensconced. And in this intersecting flow of change, perhaps we can find the stillness in our hearts and strength in our resolve to be here for those who are reaching out to us.