Ground

I’m terrified.

I’m terrified of the impermanence of life, that I will die. And it’s not just that I will die, it’s that I may die too young, without getting to experience all of the things that I want to experience. I suppose I’m greedy for experience, for seeing the kids grow old and sitting on the porch with Emily when we’re wrinkly and for having a a bittersweet retirement party one day from the fire department.There are just a lot of things that I want to do still, and if I die from cancer at a young age, I won’t ever get to see them.

And not just that, but it will bring hardship on my family. I love them all, each one individually, so much so that I can’t bear the thought of being the cause of more hardship in their lives. They deserve so much happiness.

So because of those things, I am terrified. But I’m beginning to suspect that the state of terror isn’t such a “bad” one, for lack of a better word. For some reason, there’s a negative, unpleasant feeling attached to it, and I think that’s really what is so distasteful about it. When that’s removed, though, being scared is tolerable. It’s something that I can allow to be alongside me, and I don’t need to panic and immediately try to eradicate it.

And I’m surprised to say that right here, in this entirely groundless state, is where I want to be. So much suffering is caused by our attempts to find solid ground. When we allow ourselves to just not know, however, possibilities for joy and kindness and compassion open up that we never knew we’d see. But I think that only people who have been through suffering and have been forced to live without solid ground can easily choose to continue living that way. I’ve watched Band of Brothers recently, and it seems like veterans experience this, too. Suffering can free us from our conception that we should seek the pleasant and flee from the unpleasant, and this creates space in our hearts for warmth and love and gentleness.

So I think my cancer and then this crazy pandemic, which is just the particular form that suffering took in my life recently, was a great gift. It pulled the ground out from underneath me and showed me that it’s okay here. And I’m really shocked to say that I prefer it here, in the uncomfortable space of not knowing.

I have to laugh, though, when I still catch myself all the time trying to solidify things. I find that my habit of doing so is especially tenacious as it concerns my identity, and with that, my ego. I think all the time, “I really like the way I look when I do such and such,” or, “people will really think that I’m this or that kind of guy now that I’m…” I’m really hilariously vain, and I can’t shake the habit of trying to establish a self-approved identity in some way. I'm even thinking about what people will think about me when they read this. So it goes.

And that’s kind of how everything is, isn’t it? It just goes. We think we know, but we don’t. We do, but we don’t. We learn, we work, we suffer, we rejoice, and sometimes we even love purely and without ulterior motives. And at the bottom of it all there is a great impartiality to life that is both terrifying and life-giving. I don’t know what to think of it, but I don’t have to know. None of us do. That’s the sigh of relief, the exhalation when you finally lay down to rest at the end of a long day. We don’t have to know. We don’t have to decide. We don’t have to have an opinion. We just have to be, and that’s the one thing we’ve all been successfully doing since the day we were born and will continue to do until the day we draw our last breath, whether it’s after a long, blessed life or far too soon.