The other day my roommate set out to a lawyer to write her Will. I’d never heard of someone in their thirties go through this process; I was intrigued and thought that it would a be fun experiment to write a Will of my own. While I was working on it I realized that it was a wonderful exercise to get precise on what was important to me while I am alive.
How do I die gracefully?
I do not have much interest in leaving physical things behind. Not that I currently can at the moment; I have very little things to give away. I don’t own a house, or a car, or have any financial assets whatsoever. No safety nets. My bank account is slightly negative. According to the banks, I might leave this earth with a negative number. That doesn't mean I don't wish to leave something behind for others to enjoy, and neither did I intend for this current outcome. I didn’t abandon financial safety nets all together. I’ve simply stopped striving in the same way I was taught to strive. The transition into this new way to move about the world, one that brings me an incredible sense of peace, can take a number of years to mature. For now, I find myself shrinking back into a harmless little seed, unable to move about much at all. There’s no telling what the future will hold.
I was sharing this part of myself with a retired medical doctor I had met at the beach, and while I was talking, I could see that he was starting to panic. He kept asking, “What are your plans for the future?” and it seemed that whenever I gave him an answer about what I enjoyed doing, he expressed a mild feeling of relief. However, I was unable to give him any definite answers because I just didn’t know. Nor could I pretend any longer to know where life would take me. I used to tell myself, “Oh, God has a plan and I am sure it’ll end up fine, I just need to surrender to it” and also, “A tiny little seed can turn into a big tree, so be patient!” These are some of the innocent ways I would reassure myself, and self-soothe, while I am careening deeper and deeper into an unknown. If I am sincere with myself, however, I am starting to see more and more that I have always been careening from one event to the next, not really knowing what's coming up next, but always making the best use of what was in front of me.
Anyway, the simple answer is that while I am alive, I’d like to make this world better than how I found it. At the very least, I’d like to transmit to others an attitude of selflessness, less perfectionism, gentleness and love. We could also use compassion with each other. A lot more compassion.
Not long ago, I was at the beach and I decided to make a shelter out of the local materials around. I was a reading a book on wilderness survival, so I was inspired to try to make one. I gathered leafs and sticks and made a debris-hut. When I finished, I was satisfied knowing that if I was ever stranded in the cold out in the middle of nowhere, this could be the way to stay alive. It was rejuvenating to know that I could generate a feeling of safety and home out of sticks and leafs. I mean what a departure from what I was normally accustomed to doing for generating those feelings, which was to earn money in order to afford rent and food. It was so delightful to be able to relax my body and feel less anxious with far less than what I though I needed.
I left the shelter as it was is, and then I went to work. The next day I was delightfully surprised. Someone had seen my shelter and was inspired to create one of their own. Looking at the footprints, I could see a little toddler as well as two adults. As I looked closer at the cute little shelter they had built, tears started to well up, and a story had began to form in my mind about what had transpired. The toddler, very young, was the architect behind the shelter. The parents, I presumed, were there to do the heavy lifting. The shelter was very impractical, and yet it was delightfully charming. Bits and pieces of leafs and sticks were carefully placed in the oddest places. Truly, only a child could have imagined such a masterpiece. To think that my shelter had inspired a young family to spend an afternoon bonding over shelter-building had me weeping on my hands and knees for a couple of minutes.
This was the type of nourishment I had longed for as a child, but never received. My parents were workaholics and were not home often to play with us kids. When they were home, they were busy running errands. To imagine this happening brought me tears because it touches on a deep childhood wound. I always wondered why my parents were always working instead of being with us.
More importantly, I realized then that my impact on this earth was profound, unknowable and far reaching. It was beyond my imagination. There was just no way I could have predicted that a young family would pass by and make their own shelter. Still, I am beckoned to leave more sculptures behind just to see what wild things emerge from their ripples.
Lastly, it was an important lesson in perfectionism, one that has impacted how I am facing my own death. Just in being alive, and in going about my day, and in following the things I find fascinating, that was already making ripples in people’s lives and I was already leaving behind meaningful things. There was no intention there at all, and yet I was already changing the world. How bizarre, and quite liberating! For me, it meant that to leave behind the things I wished to leave behind, I need not strive with the same difficulty as I had been striving with earlier in my life. It was now more of an artwork that takes a life of its own and across time. That meant having freedom to move or do things as they emerge spontaneously on their own. The perfectionism lies in making too many corrections to a point where I start to loose the sense of enjoyment in what I am doing. Where do I draw that line for myself? I inspected the oddly placed sticks and leafs left behind by the little kid, and I realized that not everything in existence needed a valid reason to exist where it was. This was creativity in its purest form. No reasoning or logic at all, just existence. Perfectionism is an inquiry which I continue to engage in on a daily basis.
The Unpredictability of death
In writing a Will, I am thinking about death and how it could arrive at any moment. I am further beckoned to relax a little more on any grand over-arching intention regarding what I should be doing with the rest of my life.
Simultaneously, and paradoxically, I am led to inquire about how I am spending my time. Am I holding tightly to a dream which isn’t here yet? Am I able to walk with a sense of ease and joyfulness of being alive while I am awake and am I able enjoy things as they come, whether pleasant or unpleasant?
It could be tomorrow or next year or in ten years. The more I dwell on it, the more the dream of living until old age seems to fall apart. There seems to be no foundation to that reasoning whatsoever. Its wishful thinking! The idea of growing old and having a family makes me smile and happy in the same way that watching bird hatchlings being fed by their mother makes me happy. I don’t even know why it makes me happy. To see a mother tending to their child is a beautiful thing. However, a hungry hawk lingering nearby could swoop in at any moment. Some people die at 30, some at 60 and some at 90. No matter how hard we try to secure our own safety in our health, in our finances, in our relationships, death could come unexpectedly whether we like it or not. Not that we should remain passive about it, and give up on life and say “I’m going to die anyway, so we might as well not live.” On the other extreme, such as here in the West, we don’t do anything about death and instead do everything we can to avoid the subject altogether. The other day a coworker in a conversation said, “Well you never know, we could die tomorrow,” and they were immediately met with “Don’t say that!” by another coworker. When I was younger I used to torture my poor mom for amusement when I noticed she had behaved similarly. She had a phrase she would repeat whenever she heard something she didn’t want to hear, and yet held a trace of the truth of our reality. She wanted to deny it ever happening. I'd say: “I could die on the plane ride during the Christmas holidays.” “Cancel, cancel, cancel!” Knock, Knock, Knock on wood. “I could live as a monk and never have kids”: “cancel cancel cancel!”
I used to relax into the conclusion that the likelihood of growing old is higher than the likelihood of having a deadly accident, and so dismissed the contemplations altogether, citing that “luck is in my favour,” or that “times are fruit-full and technology is good, so lets not dwell on it.” Also, it was extraordinarily easy to shift my attention back into my material world and meet the pressing demands of having to earn a living. However, I dare not repeat what I did during University: I was so busy solving math problems, that only when I finished my program and had nothing else to do later that summer did it actually occur for me to ask, “Where the hell am I going?” Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of engineering questions, but I believe that the business of our lives is a barrier to look at that initially frightening truth. I noticed that when I explored these myths about death with absolute sincerity, that profound shifts in the way I have been spending my time began to show up. I even noticed changes right down to my morning routine. It made me look at people differently too. I’d scratch my head at people at the park and wonder, “Why is every body in such a rush all the time? Why are we being mean to each other while we chase our goals? Does it really warrant being a rude person to another human being when things don’t go according to plan?”
Death itself continues to be an ongoing inquiry for me.
Why contemplate?
I am beckoned to imagine how to die gracefully. How does one die gracefully? This, to me, is the most important contemplation there is to be had. It is the same as asking “Why am I alive?” or “What am I here to do?” When I think about what I’d like to leave behind, then I am compelled to think beyond my self, beyond the life of this tiny man I am currently embodying, or the life I am creating with my hands, and instead think of the world at large, the world I am leaving behind.
Songyal Rinpoche, in his famous book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying wrote words which brought me a sense of urgency to this contemplation:
I have come to realize that the disastrous effects of the denial of death go far beyond the individual: They affect the whole planet. Believing fundamentally that this life is the only one, modern people have developed no long-term vision. So there is nothing to restrain them from plundering the planet for their own immediate ends and from living in a selfish way that could prove fatal for the future.
When I think about my mortality I think about my lifespan from above. I look at my annual plants and wonder why they exchange their life for seeds. Why not live and also have seeds at the same time? The simple answer is that they do not have the genetic precursor to do both. Like parents that sacrifice their time and energy, these plants sacrifice their very lives to make seeds.
When I see my limited life, I am beckoned to inquire about how I'm going to spend time here on earth. I see that my personal life is insignificant compared to the greater whole, which lasts much longer than I will. And because I am part of the greater whole, which sustains me, then I am compelled to nurture that whole. It doesn't feel right to do otherwise.
Songyal's insight touches on something I seem to already know, and that has led me to imagine creative ways to leave a mark on the planet that will benefit myself and others.
What is important to me?
With less frequency, I dream about a better world. That might seem a little backwards, but I am finding that as time passes, more and more of my hopes and dreams become rather unimportant. I guess this is what it means to live free from desire. So even though I have wishes for a better world, there is a tension that arises when I don't meet reality as it currently is, and instead linger for a long time in the fantasy world of my thoughts and dreams. Not only that, if I cling on to utopia and continue to observe the world decline, I can be sure to encounter disappointment, remorse, apathy, anger, frustration, lethargy etc. Not that those emotions are to be avoided at all costs. There is a difference between losing something that is meaningful or precious, such as a home or a partner or a community or friendships and deluding myself into a world that does not exist, grasping at the imaginary world, and striving to create that world. The latter results in a large amount of wasted energy. The former is pragmatic and more in line with what’s actually happening. It is entirely possible to engage in meaningful work, charity work, and activist work, or any kind of work really, without approaching any kind of burnout. I once heard it be called the difference between perfectionism and excellence. I call it Perfectionism vs Perfection. Mr. Lao Tzu called it effortless action or “doing not-doing". There are very few individuals who have truly been able to tap into that divine power, that bottomless fountain of energy which seems to allow an individual to create unusually large ripples across the landscape. What seems to be common across most of them is a clear sense of selflessness.
What is selflessness?
To me it has a slightly different meaning than what I find in its definition online or in the dictionary. Selflessness, as I see it, is as simple as maintaining one’s attention on anything other than the mental process or internal dialog which refers to itself. In other words, when the mental chatter talks about itself, i.e. “I am this…I am that… I must do this and then do that later" then it is momentarily selfish. Otherwise, it is selfless. It doesn’t refer to an entity called the self.
In my definition, selflessness and selfishness are actually rather neutral mental processes that occur on-and-off throughout the day as long as we are alive. One cannot be indefinitely selfish and one cannot be indefinitely selfless. Those ideas, I believe, are just born of stories made to help create an image of a person that is perhaps holy or perhaps villainous. As far as I see it, people are selfish and selfless all the time throughout their life.
We might say that a selfless person simply pays more attention to others or circumstances than on to himself or herself because they are more concerned about the wellbeing of others than they are of their own. However, they do not totally ignore their own self-preservation. That would be completely impossible. To meet one’s own needs require a person to be selfish for a moment, and in order to show up to the world as enthusiastically as one can be, a person needs to retract into his or her home and tend to their livelihood. This has been my experience. So everyday is an inquiry for me on how to adjust my attention.
Why Selflessness, or What makes Selflessness?
It has been my experience that a person who has cultivated selfless behavior does not tire easily, has more energy, is more vibrant, alive, joyful and can operate on a more efficient level than a person who is tends to be more selfish driven.
Why is that so? For one, when I am more selfish in general, I am busy trying to stay alive. My resources are spent trying to acquire something for myself with the believe that if I do not get it, then things could go sideways. I could end up homeless, I could loose something or someone… on and on the stories seem to go, most of them utterly false. I have to emphasize, again, that it is very innocent. I must have transitioned between living in a fearful, worrisome, dis-regulated, contracted state of being, to living in a Garden-of-Eden of sorts hundreds of times now.
Sometimes I find myself in both worlds simultaneously. For instance, I volunteer on Tuesdays for an organization where we donate food to the homeless on the street. Some days I show up starved for energy and enthusiasm. These days I feel a bit of pitty, sadness, and it is difficult to make friends to those in whom I am serving. There is a feeling of retraction and I feel contracted within myself. Its almost like I’m bracing or protecting myself from potential emotional pain. Of course it is only natural that I find it hard to be empathetic. Then there are days, particularly after long retreat-like days where I have done nothing but self-care and spent time in nature, and have been well fed physically and mentally with lots of rest and food, where I have no remorse, or pitty or devastation by what I am observing. I feel a certain lightness and an ability to listen well and with great ease. Thankfully, I am in a group setting, so I can observe different flavors of altruism amongst my peers. Its to be expected, of course, considering everyone has a differently lived experience, with unique lifestyles and choices and all of those things affect the individual in unique ways. So then sometimes when I am talking to someone and they happen to be sharing stories of devastation, loss and grief, and I happen to be in an adequate state to be serving, I am feeling in paradoxical ways, both the pleasant emotions of abundance, gratefulness and joy, as well as the unpleasant emotions of the other person. Its as if to say: “How wonderful is it to be in this journey right now where I get to feel sadness, or pain or loss.” I can enjoy myself within difficult emotions as though I'm watching a sad drama and I am not lost in it. I am tapping into a deep, internal sense of peace that pervades all experiences. It is a peace that surpasses all understanding. I can let the world around me fall into pieces, and simultaneously there is stillness within, which cannot be touched by anyone or anything.
To be able to listen to people’s stories of loss and lack and suffering and pain, not flinch away from those experiences, and not have uncomfortable emotions that are coming sway my mood to a point where I am rendered back into mild state of fear or panic is an interesting place to be in. There is also not an impulse in me to change the speaker’s perspective or their current worldview, or to reassure them in anyway in hopes of making them feel better. Love to me is very paradoxical. I am letting the person be just the way that they are, with all of their negative feelings. To not try to change them is to love them. When someone else emotion’s don’t trigger me, then compassion for them seems to emerge spontaneously on its own. Reassurance, if it does arise, is spontaneously coming from a place of love, rather than a place of wanting to rid my self of that unpleasant or uncomfortable emotion. It is a different attitude all-together, one that is nourishing.
The same is true of beliefs or viewpoints. I am able to hold two paradoxical perspectives with each other in the same space, and because there is no denial of one over the other, i.e. i’m not looking to impose my view over someone’s else or trying to compromise with them to reach some objective agreement of truth, then I am not pushing back on someone’s view, and hence I am not wasting my energy with that effort. They are also not pushing back on me, and I am not wasting energy trying to defend myself. Selflessness allows this ability to be empty of any such desires. When I am empty of viewpoints, there is nothing to be pushed, nothing to be swayed and made negative, and nothing to upset. I am not trying to defend a world I have created in my mind. I am like a blade of grass on the mountain side during strong winds. I can bend and twist but I do not break. Meanwhile, if I were big, solid, rigid and secure in what I believe -and believe me I have been solid many times- then I break easily. I go home and lay on my bed with a kind of agony and pain I would not wish on anyone. This pain is the heart cracking open, a lesson well learnt.
This phenomenon, I believe, is where the selfless person is drawing their energy from. Just to be clear, it’s not that the selfness person has extra energy or more energy than the average person. Its that the selfless person is not wasting his or her energy maintaining a personal sense of self, and is not busy keeping up the walls of their established identity towards others.
When I have not taken adequate care of myself by regulating my body well, and meeting my needs, it is extraordinarily difficult to be selfless, and all too easy to start worrying about my next pay check. I believe it's a natural human response to be self-centered when in such a state. The body is desperately needing to take care of what’s important, and why should anybody deny themselves those basic human needs. Simultaneously, to reach feelings of adequacy and self-regulation and happiness, we need not make it so complicated, or buy into the many hundreds of beliefs we are fed on a daily basis, that convince us that we would not be happy unless we've achieved this or that, or if we have acquired something. Most often than not, though not always the case, its just a matter of resting well. Perhaps, then, I should consider whether showing people how to rest well is a good use of my time.
Gentleness
About a a year and a half ago, I entered into a video conversation with a dear friend who happened to be my coach at the time. Within moments of saying Hello, I started to feel a sense of panic and then a bit of fear, and then grief and then a bit confusion. I contemplated on that reaction for a long time.
Months later, I began to feel those same sets of emotions, just by myself, every once in a blue moon. Before long, I felt them more and more frequently. It was the same recognizable pattern: a feeling of a mild panic, then a sense of fear, then grief, and then a bit of confusion. When I realized what was causing these emotions, I started to treat myself differently. I started to hold myself with a great compassionate hug for as long as I could before my conditionings inevitably brought me back to a different state of being. I cherished these particular moments with great delicacy.
With careful observation I could see a pattern emerge whenever I transitioned from an attitude of harshness, to an attitude of gentleness or softness. Panic ensues because gentleness is a different way to treat myself, when compared to a habitual way of treating myself. If the panic could speak, it would say, “I don’t like this gentleness, it is too unusual or unfamiliar. What do I do with this?” Then fear would kick in and say, “I don’t like this! Its too familiar! It reminds me of the way my parent’s treated me!” (They were ambivalent). Then grief comes in afterwards and says, “Why was I treating myself so harshly all this time? Who taught me to treat myself so harshly? Oh poor me!” There is a bit of pouting in there as well, a bit of disbelief and a sense of betrayal. Confusion and sometimes disorientation tends to follow these unexpected emotions. Then sometimes rage. I mainly felt rage at the way the members of our society continue to treat each other with a sense of harshness. These days it seems like everyone is treating themselves very harshly without even realizing it. They are completely nose-blind to it, even though they may be well intentioned.
A little over two years now, thankfully, the pattern is falling apart. The harshness is melting away, and is being replaced by a more consistent attitude of gentleness. My coach, way back when, had been showing me how to treat a person like a human being. For the first time in perhaps many decades, I was regularly speaking with someone who had absolutely no desire to change me in any way whatsoever. What a relief!
Later on, I tried to emulate this. At first I was treating myself as therapist would treat a client, not in a clinical “I’m here to fix you or help you” kind of way, but more so holding unconditional positive regard for myself. I was seeing the innocence of all of my actions, and not judging myself after-the-fact by holding on to a little reel about how things should have gone and then saying, “Its ok, we can do better next time” or “baby steps.” That’s the type of relationship that parents have with their kids when they are trying to teach them things. This was more intimate than that. If my attitude could have words it would say, “Sweetie, what do you need right now?” and then listening very closely with unlimited compassion and patience. It was like waiting for a wounded animal to come out of its hiding hole, and I was willing to sit there and wait for hours or days if that’s how long it took. I would never reach my hand in and grab the animal forcefully. I stopped imposing too many “should” on my myself when it came to matters of health and wellbeing. It was useful to pay close attention to my attitude. You see, I spent most of my life living in what I call “the objective world.” In this world, there are objective rules, and everyone knows the same objective rules, and if we didn’t follow them, then we’d get in trouble, or cause mayhem, and bad things would happen. Living in such a mind-state for so long, I forgot what I was like to put myself first. I would go to work when I didn’t feel like going to work. I’d schedule the alarm and wake up early after going to bed in a dysregulated state. I’d go to class half-groggy and slap myself awake so as to pay attention. I was simply following the masses and schedules without questioning anything. I was pretty much a zombie. More importantly, I was neglecting my needs. I was so blind to my needs that I was starting to feel psychosomatic discomforts like pain and headaches and I was coping in a million ways through the use of my phone, video games, and food. No more doing things just because everybody else seemed to be doing those things. I needed to re-learn how to properly move about the world from my biological tissues, from my sense perceptions.
The process of returning to a sense of gentle-ness, and softness basically involved re-examining the way I was living my life, and then also looking at what was happening internally. It was a three spearheaded approach: seeing clearly within, without and then closely listening to the boundary between the two; seeing how one affected the other. By gradually giving more space, I found the freedom and safety needed to express myself. When I could express internal and external desires and needs, I could more easily detect an unmet need. When I met those unmet needs, then how I treated myself started to change. Rather than seeing myself as some wheel in the machinery of society that was somehow indispensable, or perhaps as an actor in God’s great mysterious story and that I needed to fulfill some holy duty, I started to get more down to earth. I internalized, basically, that I mattered. I had needs that needed meeting, and I became entitled to fulfill those needs. It was a healthy sense of entitlement, and one that originated from being continually attuned to my senses.
Eventually something quite unexpected and delightful started to come about with greater frequency. One particular day stands out above the others. I was spending time at the beach one sunny morning. It was a little chilly, and the water was crystal clear. It was beckoning for me to get in. I stripped to my underwear and plunged for only a few minutes before the cold got unbearable. In order to warm up, I started on jumping jacks, and pushups. I rolled around on the sand and let the sun warm my back. Finally, I put my clothes back on, and then sat on a log to read a book. Just then, an emotion I had not felt in over a decade began to wash over me. I immediately stopped reading and began to bask in the feeling and to examine it. It was the same emotion I had felt when I was dating someone. It wasn’t a honeymoon-type of feeling that happens at the beginning of a relationship, but one that happens after getting to know the person well.
I felt a sense of belonging, and togetherness, and there was a real sweetness to it that only seems to come about when I was with the person. It also felt affectionate and very intimate, and it was originating in my lower belly, just below the belly button. It surprised me because there was nobody there with me at the beach that day to make me feel that way. Rather, this particular beach I had come to know intimately over many months, visiting it almost every day. I suppose that on this day, I had finally made myself vulnerable by exposing my skin to the cold, the sun and the sand. I understood, to an extent, what creates a sense of affection in a romantic setting; a combination of having physical and psychological space to be vulnerable, as well as getting to know and understand, and care for the person on a deep level. To my delightful surprise, such a feeling was no longer limited to bonds between two human beings, but expanded to bonds made with the land itself. I was now meeting my intimate and affectionate needs completely by my lonesome on a regular basis. No more relying on another person to make me happy for the rest of my life. If I ever meet someone and fall in love with them, then I will kiss them as they fly away into a great sense of freedom.
I believe that when wise indigenous elders from around the world spoke of this kind of affection and connection to the land, this is what they meant. I wonder how differently our society would be if most people had this kind of wisdom, this ability to connect with themselves in such an intimate fashion, to drink from the land and its sweet nectar and be satisfied within their hearts, and to allow the land to carry them as though they were a little kid swinging on a hammock by the beach. Any form of mistreatment or harshness would stick out like a sore thumb in the person’s eye!
Meet death right now!
I don’t see a reason to wait to be on my death-bed to meet death. Its an invitation to free myself from the fear of death itself. Right here. Today. How many impactful decisions will be made from this contemplation, I wonder.
Just recently, I had a two-day work week, and boy what a delightful experience that was. I was nearly able to enter full retreat mode. Alas, it was just enough for my body to remember what it was like to live in a world where the earning of money was not a prerequisite to simply existing. This is really important to me: To re-teach my body that earning and achieving and doing is not necessary to be alive and happy. I do not need to earn affection. I sat at my usual spot on the beach. I was staring into the horizon when a thought had cross my mind:
”What the hell am I waiting for?”
“Why am I still running in this rat race of sorts?”
I was wondering why I was still working at a job I didn’t like. More questions followed up:
”Who am I trying to please?”
“Where am I really going?”
“Where are we all really going?”
I realized that I was just about to step into my own shoes. I was just about to do exactly what felt was right for me, and not contort myself to fit or conform to a sleeping society. This was the impact that contemplating on death has had on me. To meet death right here and now was to begin living enthusiastically. It is to cherish every day as though it could be the last, and to not grasp too tightly to a future which may never happen at all. Really, its just about what’s happening now.
- Guillermo, 2024