How do we navigate our remaining days? asks Rico Provasoli in this essay
As the afternoon sun brightens the Fall colors, I watch the squirrels prepare for the coming winter. And then I look up as the Canadian honkers call overhead on their migration south. I take a breath and am touched by a spell of immortality. This is particularly poignant as more of my peers pass to the next adventure after they dropped their aging bodies. I no longer attend memorial services for the dearly departed but choose instead to bid my farewells as I stroll the avenues of our memories together. If I were a country western singer, I might sing a soft melody something like: Happy Trails to you, old friend, until we meet again across the expanse of Happy Hunting Grounds.
If this was good enough for the Indigenous Americans, well, it feels right to me as life continues the great return of all life.
Not to get overly theological, but it seems to me that we each must create our own version of cosmology, of the ineffable mystery of not knowing anyone’s fate after they pass away. I have long since dismissed the Disneyland version of the afterlife throttled into me by nuns and priests as a young boy. Or the multiple other versions of the hereafter promoted as infallible creed by the major world religions. Many people are uncomfortable in not nailing down a very specific gospel, a written-in-stone, if you will, unarguable conviction of who goes to Paradise and who doesn’t. What if we believe nothing but our direct experience? What if we are motivated by a profound curiosity? Not only about the fate of our souls in the afterworld, but about our life here, now?
In the early mornings, I sip my coffee and marvel at the mystery of the miniature ivy houseplant growing on my kitchen table. It reminds me that life goes on, whether or not I am here. That the cosmos presents the great return of life in each leaf of the ivy. That we are stardust. That we are the ocean. That we emerge from life. That one day life calls us back to the bosom of creativity. That we return to the beginning. That the mystery of life includes the mystery of death. Not different. But the same process of birth and renewal and completion. This moment of quietude, the origin of all meditation practice, opens the spaciousness of a day without the rubbish of the mind’s confabulations.
It has taken years and years of dropping the demand my mind insists on needing to keep me comfortable in my beliefs. In Zen, the major guideline is to encourage not knowing. I can’t tell you how the vicious inner battle raged, how the mind decreed this the gravest of heresies: That I would perish in the land of the demented if I couldn’t nail on the door of perception that this is how things are, my child. So, we train to sit with the uncomfortable feelings, the lack of conviction. In truth, none of us really knows or can come close to fathoming the miracle of life using our ordinary mind. But that same mind screams in protest that we will be lost like the ancient mariners who sailed with only a primitive compass, only the earliest nautical charts and believed that they would perish when their ship sailed off the edge of the known world.
How do we navigate our remaining days? In approaching reality trying to figure out the answers as if the mystery were a crossword puzzle? Hoping we don’t sail off course? Or, can we learn to follow the undercurrents our souls are beseeching us to discover?
This essay was also published in The Good Men Project and on Medium
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