Jan 3, 2024
It’s a new year and I still have no idea what I’m doing. I think it might be like that until the day I die of old age. I’m okay with that. With letting life live me. Letting life unfold and take me on its journey.
There’s a funny construct of this time and place called society. It has this compelling nature of making you feel as if you have to have something to show for your short time here on this planet. Do the great apes need to have something to show for their time here? Does anyone remember the accomplishments of the ruby throated hummingbird drinking from the honeysuckle once it’s left this earth? Does anyone ask the great black bear what impression he has left in the world once he has caught his last salmon and laid down for his final hibernation?
We obsess over this for ourselves. We sit for hours a day staring into a little device screen working to make our lives relevant. We stay up at night worrying trying to find ways to live forever. We overlook impermanence. We were meant to be forgotten. We were born to die. We were born to fade away into the nothingness yet we work so hard in this precious, fleeting lifetime to become permanent. To leave a legacy. We write books as if it makes us more real to live beyond our lifetime. We hold classes or create art to heal others or impress them or convince them that we know something important or that we can do something beautiful. We need recognition that we are humaning the “right” way.
It’s all just an expression of our fear of dying, our fear of fading back into the nothingness. How many careers were had out of pure bliss? How many breaths were breathed just because it felt amazing to have oxygen passing through our lungs? We talk so much about living a life of purpose. Just being here is purpose enough.
Do we think the universe had a purpose when creating us? No. It’s just creating and destroying, it’s just rolling onwards in a curious play that happened to create us and many other things that have come and gone that no one remembers or cares to remember. One day, when the earth falls into the sun, no one will remember what Amanda created or did, there will be no more history or accounting of what was. It will all just be gone. And I’m so okay with that.
The ego has such a way of clinging. Of making itself so important. Of wanting to live forever. What if my life could be as small as possible? What if I could live in a way to be forgotten? What if I could effortlessly surrender it all back to the earth, to the process of creation and destruction? What if I could leave this life net zero? What if no one remembered my name? What if I left nothing behind and became nothing in my lifetime? What if I just softly lived this life? What if I tread so lightly that I didn’t even leave my footsteps behind?
All the pressure, all the grasping and clinging softens. I am here. Breath in my lungs. That is enough for me. Thank you for this humble life. Thank you for love coursing through my veins. Thank you for life and death and the cycles of nature and my own body. Thank you that that is enough for me and its pretty damn grand.