I walk past the old photo albums and am tempted to look at one from 35 years ago, from when we were young and married for 3 years. I’m alone in the silence of 6:00AM, in the kitchen drinking tea and watching the past.
Seeing what we did, and who we were, and comparing it to what we do and who we are “here and now“, a question comes to me: what is life? I see that 35 years ago we already had everything: a good job, good salaries, a small but clean, elegant and cozy house, perfect health, perfect skin, and the young and bright look that suggests an energy behind it. We had a great time traveling by motorbike, doing tourism, trekking and hiking. We were alive. We were life.
I find it funny that oft-repeated mantra, “live in the here and now”, those who say it must have a here and now of well-being, but when you get out of bed and everything hurts, you would prefer to be somewhere else and at another time past, because the future looks even worse. I understand what they mean, but its practical application is very limited.
Now we don’t travel anymore. At most we spend a weekend in a hotel no more than 100km from home. We don’t trek. We don’t have the knees to do it. We don’t ride motorbikes. Our gaze has lost energy, and our skin has wrinkled. My partner suffers from chronic illnesses, and I am on my way to having them as well. We are alive, but less alive than before. And death is coming slowly.
So life is not like an “all or nothing” switch, we are alive or we are dead. Rather it is like a variable state. And it has to do with the available life energy. As children we still don’t have it all, potentially we do, but it still has to develop. As young people we are at 100% vital energy, therefore fully alive. And as the years go by we lose life until we lose it altogether.
It is often objected that in old age we can be very lucid, even very active even with the physical limitations of age. But that lucidity depends on the good functioning of the brain, and this in turn depends on health. Sleeping little and badly, having a reduced ability to breathe, having a weak heart, and many other causes associated with old age cause a deterioration of brain activity and a loss of cognitive abilities, not to mention the terrible disease of Alzheimer’s, of which I watched my mother-in-law die slowly.
And what can we say about consciousness? In my sixties I recognize that I am more aware than at 20. In what sense? At 20 I was fully identified with my mind, with my thoughts. Not now. I am now aware of a depth of Being independent of thoughts. In a sense I am more aware of life now than before. Is life perhaps consciousness? Or maybe Being is primordial life, and vital energy is biological life, a manifestation of Being? Then death would not exist, only life and its manifestations would exist.
But it is difficult to fully identify with that consciousness of Being Life. The ailments are there bothering you, telling you in your ear “you are getting old, you are deteriorating more with each passing day, and you are going to end up badly.” And what I take worst is seeing this progressive, unstoppable deterioration in loved ones. My wife has it worse than me because her lucidity is far from what she was. Not to mention other grandparents, parents, in-laws, uncles, all already deceased, some with a lot of suffering.
I now fully understand the Buddha’s shock when he first witnessed old age, decay, illness and death, a shock that led him to abandon everything to find liberation. I also aspire to liberation from progressive death, to be Life. I better hurry before I lose my lucidity too and can no longer make it in this life.
the closed room 