A Reflection on the Five Remembrances

 

The Five Remembrances

I am of the nature to grow old.

There is no way to escape growing old. 

 

I am of the nature to have ill health.

There is no way to escape ill health. 

 

I am of the nature to die.

There is no way to escape death. 

 

All that is dear to me and everyone I love

are the nature to change.

There is no way to escape

being separated from them. 

 

My actions are my only true belongings.

I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.

My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

The Five Remembrances is my very favourite gattha. It might seem gloomy but in fact I find it very reassuring. I think for me the scariest thing is feeling like I might fail to prevent something (illness, etc.) or fail to do something important. This gattha tells me that I can't truly prevent them and so I am allowed to stop trying.

I'm really not explaining that well. Perhaps it makes better sense to say that they reassure me that all of these things are natural and not disasters to be prevented. So I can begin to accept them more. I can say that the first time I started reciting it to myself, when I was driving on a highway I didn't know and was feeling anxious, it calmed me right down. Well, not right down. But it helped. The thing I fear most in that situation is having a car crash and dying or suffering greatly. In that moment, allowing myself to accept that death is inevitable helped me let go of some of my fear in driving at that moment.

I decided when I was extremely young that since I couldn't know whether or not there was life after death there was no point in contemplating it further. It seemed like there were enough things to worry about that were more concrete. As time went on even that fell away. I just can't believe in heaven or hell or any sort of afterlife. And I'm actually fine with that.

For me, when I say goodbye to this life, and everyone and everything in it, that is final, which makes it all the more poignant. Being able even for a fraction of a moment to see my death in the context of all those other deaths, the small and vast deaths that are happening all around me every moment of the day, even the small and larger deaths that are happening inside my body every moment of the day, to see time unroll before me and after me, makes it less sad and more beautiful.

I do like the focus of taking care of yourself so that old age is as pleasant as possible. I don't manage to do all of the things I know would help me in that regard but I do keep it as a main focus, if not the main focus. Shifting more and more to that being the main focus as time goes on. Mama needs more rest!

For Sr Thuận Nghiêm's dharma talk on the Five Remembrances, click here.

Image: of Irish crane, back after 300 years of their absence on the island. From ireland.com

On the Verge

This may be the last post I write about moving. (Although it may well not be--such is the enormity of this transition in my scale of things.)

My ex's--my dear, dear friend's--father died this week. I have spent several days with him upmost in my mind, and yesterday we gathered around his funeral in the Jewish cemetery in White Rock where Susan's mother is buried, and we acknowledged and honoured his life and the emotion of those who loved him most. We returned to Susan's to eat and talk. We took breaks, more people came and others left. We ate more, and prayed the Kaddish.

Though I have seen him little in the last several years, Susan's father has been a nearly daily part of my life as I listened to her tales and heard her struggles in supporting a spirited, stubborn man who was in his hundredth year when he died. Now he is dead, and while the prayers continue, and the legal and practical work awaits, there is something gone from our lives that will never be again. There is, amidst the clatter of dishes and the singing of psalms, a silence profound and permanent. Philip is gone. Susan's parent is no more.

In the face of this, my own transition seems small, and yet for me it is substantial. In two days the contents of the garden will in large part be moved, and three days later everything else I own will begin to find its way to my new home. It will take years to sort it out, I'm sure. But not so terribly long to make the bed, put the toothbrush in its holder, figure out where to put my books.

In both of these transitions, people have gathered. Not dozens, not hundreds, not necessarily the ones we might have expected in every case. But they have come together although they did not have to and have made what seemed impossible something of beauty and gratitude.

One friend who joined in the first round of moving (to the place I never quite moved into), had not been in touch for years. But somehow I thought, what the heck, and asked, and he came, girlfriend in tow. Another brand new friend who is helping--boyfriend in tow--is the woman who is moving into my old dear apartment. How amazing is that?

Two of my nephews, my friends, people I see seldom, people I see often--one woman I have not seen in forty years, but she is coming with her truck, and we can smile at each other again.

This is community. We can feel so damned alone sometimes, can feel and be isolated, can feel and be imperfect friends. And then some huge transition comes along, cancer, or childbirth, or moving, or death, and suddenly we see reflected in the faces around us the love they feel, the generosity they hold, the meaning of people living our lives together in a difficult world.

I am grateful. I am profoundly moved. (I hope I don't really take years to unpack everything.)

The blessings of this rich and varied life, revealed once more.

The Ever-Sad Thrill of Death

Saman Kunan

Each time I hear about the diver who died after bringing O2 to the kids in the Thai cave yesterday I feel so sad. 

I live in Vancouver, BC. In our province we have many high mountains and rushing rivers, snowfields and waterfalls. We rest against a broad ocean and there are endless tracks in our forests. Ten minutes from the city you can go off the trail for an adventure and find yourself hopelessly lost.

Three young adventurers, who made their living filming themselves doing daring thngs in nature, died this week in falls I have camped near several times. Their friends and families are mourning and in shock. When these things happen, as they do so very often here, amongst the tears I hear expressions meant to console--that they died doing something they loved.

Saman Kunan died because a group of children, led by an adult, went on an extremely dangerous lark as the result of a dare. He may have been doing something he loved, but he wasn't doing it for fun, and he wasn't risking other people's lives to enjoy himself.

He isn't the first rescuer to die in the attempt of saving other lives.

I didn't know Saman or his family but I am feeling grief for him which is accentuated by years of hearing stories like this on the radio, over and over again, of people going unprepared into the backcountry or of difficult, heroic attempts to peel daredevils off of cliff-faces. I do also grieve for the young people who have not yet learned that they aren't invulnerable, whose joy in their strength and physicality and the thrill of risk is not tempered by sufficient belief that staying alive is thrilling, too. It was one year ago to the day from the death of the three vloggers at Shannon Falls that the young Irish footballer, David Gavin, drowned when he dove into the churning waters of a river near Golden, BC. He knew he could handle it. They knew they could handle it.

What is my point? That people shouldn't take risks? That we should leave them to it if they do stupid things that risk their lives and our own?

I don't know that I have a point, actually. Sometimes when I hear these things, some guy in flip flops who decided to leave the designated trails and ends up with a three day all out search through the mountainside, I get huffy like my parents would and grumble, "Leave him up there! Make him pay for the rescue!" and other such sympathetic things. So sure, the sheer waste of it angers me, too.

But right now I'm overwhelmingly sad. Sad at a world where peoples en masse are facing abuse and death trying to escape their violent and impoverished homelands. Sad at a world where men like he-who-shall-not-be-named are doing everything they can to roll back the rights of the environment and the humans who dwell in it. Sad at young people who throw their lives and those of their rescuers away for a thrill.