Oh no, everything is ending!
To live is to suffer. Bear with me while I go on about an excruciating but extremely important principle of life that I’ve held very close to my heart. See, I’ve been trying to learn Sanskrit and Pali despite the shorter days and longer times it takes me to properly finish each of my university’s assignments so that I can understand Buddhism better. Perhaps this is the result of once stacked, now collapsing, unimaginable pain that I’ve gladly gobbled up all these years ago coming back all together, flooding my mind, forcing me to crawl back to religion, or perhaps this is a plea to the world to teach me better ways to handle conflicts, innately and outwardly, or perhaps I am slowly admitting that what my mother tried to tell me had some sort of truth to it, no matter how harsh the approach she took to make me understand was, or perhaps this is just an aftermath of a spiritual psychosis. Or perhaps I simply don’t want to be in a state of limerence or linger around the haunted halls of the past anymore. Perhaps I want to live. I don’t have an answer to it, really, as I don’t have an answer to a lot of things. But I digress. There is a point I’m trying to make somewhere, I promise.
Being in your twenties mean you have absolutely no clue of how anything works and you have been killed and reborn again and again and again and people are no more than a distant memory, blurry and haunting (only if you let it) and you have to choose between learning to accept everything as it is or going absolutely batshit insane. I’m sure I have yet to learn more about inevitable endings whether I avoid it like a plague or not but at this point I like to hope I’ve got a pretty good idea about them. I would even go so far as to say I think it’s the only concept that I am familiar with at this time in my life. I genuinely don’t know anything about anything else and the unknown has been scaring me so much. Surely the experience is universal. It’s something so extremely simple that you might read this and utter “Obviously? I’m not so sure why you’re writing such a lengthy post about it,” but as someone whose mum has been etching her words of endings into my skull I still find it so upsetting to embrace it that I feel sick every time I am confronted with the concept of it. I have said, “yes, I know that, I should know that all too well, and I know all of this is going to be taken away from me abruptly and there will be nothing I can do to stop it, and I can be at least a little bit ready when it happens because I know it’s going to happen” but when it actually happened I could not run nor endure the wounds of the teeth that the hounds have sunk so deeply into my psyche. Even now I can hear the sound of the fractures shifting, I feel the sting with their every move.
There is a word in Pāli that generally translates to pain, suffering, grief, loss, lamentation and so on. (Dukkha, Sanskrit: दुःख.) Buddhism argues that not only the darker parts of life such as hate, death, poverty, but also the lighter parts of life like love, happiness, dreams are all a part of it. It is simple to label sorrow to be a terrible thing as it tangles its vines around our fragile little hearts and makes us choke on our own spit but how could happiness possibly be the cause of the similar experience? My mum would remind me, she would say, “Minerva, even the good things carry the seed of pain lurking in the depths you can’t see, waiting to sprout the moment they end, because of how deep you’ve allowed the attachment’s claws to grapple onto you. Do you understand? You need to understand that nothing ever lasts.” But of course, being ten I nodded to whatever she said to me because why would I need to worry about it right now? The world was mine and the people I loved were going to be with me forever. I don’t want to listen to her talk about rot right now, so I allowed myself to stay in denial for a little bit more.
But I am older now, and the walls are caving in and I have nowhere else to run from this jarring tragedy. The notion that happiness and joy that stem from our love and attachment to those close to us are, in turn, bound to end one day or another, in many different forms. All those glitter and gold that you dedicated half your lifespan to attain will perish from your very hands one day. The enclosed moment in time where you are in your lover’s arms will pass and one day, and nothing will remain, not even the blurry memory of it. Those wooden chairs that surround your family’s dining table will succumb to rot, and return to the soil, bound to end their lives as chairs, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And the soil that carries traces of your childhood laughter is also bound to take its leave. If you get so lucky that none of life’s adversities will cause such a thing to you, death will. You can reject impermanence of course, you can run from it, fight it away, ignore it, deny it, use your god’s complex as a shield and say you will be the first one ever in history to remain unaffected, but it will force itself upon you on one unexpecting afternoon and you will sob over it lying in a foetal position because it is overwhelming, and because pain demands to be felt. Of course, questioning the validity of such a statement is absolutely justified, after all, what a pessimistic, pompous claim to make! How dire! How depressing! Just a few posts ago you were screaming about how you love and how soft our hearts must remain and now you are writing horror tales about succumbing to the ephemeral nature of it all!
Don’t get me wrong, we must never let impermanence from being vulnerable and open and loving and accepting to be loved. One could even argue that the principle that nothing lasts is what makes us appreciate our experiences more, that the love we hold would not flow as strongly and authentically if forever is true. Plus, everything will surely dissipate over time but one could argue that life takes its form once again, born anew, start of another cycle. Does that mean they truly ended? (But again, another discussion to be made later. I’m babbling at this point.)
But how do we manage? The grief that comes at the end is proportionate to how much love you had given, and I refuse to stop loving just because I am going to puke my organs out clutching my chest when the impermanence makes its existence known. This is all I am, to love is all I’ve ever strived to do, to get rid of it would be to rip out the essence of my very being. And if you don’t feel anything after the death of it, did you ever even really love it, whatever it was? We can’t just force down the idea that we must be entirely in the present and let it go once it has passed. I guess I don’t quite have an answer to it yet, even the concept I am familiar with proves to be a stranger. Or perhaps there is no choice but to feel everything as they are, without selection. Perhaps there is a greater meaning to all of this, something that couldn’t possibly fit inside a single website page. I’m tired of leaving my posts so painfully open-ended, without a definitive conclusion but maybe five years from now I will come back to this and claim that I have finally found the secret. But time is a mysterious thing, and to fully love again we must give the grief enough time to pass through. Perhaps what it means to love is to hold their hands and say “Yes, it will inevitably end, but I wouldn’t mind feeling the pain of it for you. And when I carry the weight ten times harsher on my slanted shoulders I can at least take comfort in understanding that all this grief is the proof of how much I have loved you.” Or something like that. What do I know? This is a mere rambling, and I don’t want to proofread it.
cover image taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral
