Fade

 In the 10-day Vipassana meditation course, we learn Buddha’s observation of the essential, fundamental law of nature: “Everything arises and passes away.”

And once you’ve been introduced to it, you notice it everywhere, from every single sensation on your body, to all living things, to a sundog that appears in the sky, momentarily beautiful before disappearing, to very Universe itself; it’s all ephemeral and ceaselessly changing; nothing lasts forever except the fact that nothing lasts forever.  Everyone who has ever lived will one day be gone; everything that ever was or will be will eventually be no more.

So, I’m in the process of fading away, (as I have been ever since I was born), and frankly, I don’t really mind.  I think I enjoy becoming quieter and smaller; my aspirations to greatness have shrunk commensurately.  I don’t need to feel like I’m making a huge impact; I’m content with less of a splash, leaving the surface a little smoother, with fewer ripples in my wake.

As evidenced by these words if nothing else, I’m not entirely ready to have disappeared; I still think I’ve got something to say, but I’m okay with saying it more softly, and if fewer end up hearing, that’s fine.  I don’t need to shout my message from the rooftops; stage-whispering from back porch is plenty.

In real life, I’m shrinking; as a young man, I was an inch and half taller than I am now.  Seems like an appropriate physical representation of what’s going on figuratively; over the course of the next few decades, I’ll continue to pass away until there’s nothing left of me but the palimpsest of life.  And then that, too, will disappear.

Is this sad?  Perhaps, in a way, but, then, that sadness, too, will also pass away.  Why mourn the fundamental truth of all things?  Nobody cries over the First Law of Thermodynamics, do they? Why shed a tear just because our tears will not last?