I think a lot about aging
and dying these days. No, nothing happened. I’m fine. It just hits you
sometimes – we don’t have forever.
If you’re paying attention at all you can’t help but
notice – everything moves around us like a comet. Events, people, problems, and
gifts sling in out of deep space, loom into view, come so close we can touch them,
then slip through our grasp to recede into the darkness beyond all reckoning.
The trick is not to think about it too much. Just stay present to what’s right
in front of us. Pay attention. It all goes by so fast.
Rehearsing
Death
After Socrates was tried, convicted, and sentenced to
death by the Athenian court, he awaited his execution in prison. His friend
Crito came to see him. Crito considered himself well-connected, and presented
Socrates with a proposition. I have the guard bribed, he said, the warden
bribed, and a sailboat is awaiting you in the harbor. But Socrates refused to
escape. He considered it an admission of guilt, and immoral besides. As a
devoted Athenian citizen and decorated war hero who’d benefited from Athenian
citizenship his whole life, he argued that it’s irrational to obey laws in your
own interest while breaking laws against your interest. If we do that, he said,
we violate the very concept of law and regress into naked self-interest. But
there was an even deeper reason Socrates refused to escape.
As
his friends gathered around him in the final hours, their grief was profound.
They loved their old philosopher friend, a virtuous and charismatic teacher who
exemplified for a generation of Athenians the courageous and noble pursuit of
wisdom. As Socrates lifted the cup of hemlock to his lips they wept. Yet he
remained calm, good-natured even. How, they asked, can you be so accepting of
this horrible fate? He turned to his friends and said, the philosopher
rehearses his own death. In other words, if you really love wisdom, and if
you’re really honest, then you have to admit that none of us knows what death
is. How can we be afraid of something we cannot conceive? Fear has no place in
authentic wisdom, Socrates taught. And then there’s this – what if being dead
is better than being alive? I mean, we don’t really know do we? So living in
fear of death is the height of folly.
What
does it really mean to rehearse one’s death?
“Rehearse,”
from the Old French rehercier,
originally meant “to go over again” or “repeat,” or literally “to rake over,”
and “turn over,” as in turning over the soil for planting. Rehearsing one’s
death then means to face it again and again, engage with it, work with it,
prepare for it, learn it, and turn it into a productive field of insight.
Rehearsing
our death means practicing deep acceptance of the transitory nature of all
things. To everyday let go of everything you love, to live each day as if it
were your last, and to embrace your loved ones as if you were about to be forever
parted. There is no time for half-hearted commitment. Only whole-hearted will
do. This, for Socrates, was the examined life – the only life worth living.
By not rehearsing our death, we live in an illusion,
falling prey to all manner of distortions. We slip into the illusion that we
are a permanent, isolated identity. We fall into the illusion that our current
belief system is true, pitting us in eternal conflict with all other
perspectives. We dangerously ascribe to all sorts of tribalisms, nationalisms,
and other deleterious parochial maladies. We trade in our vulnerable humanity
for false security. But in the light of wisdom we realize the fluidity of the
self, the poverty of group-think, and the provisional nature of all truth
claims. We grow willing to relinquish our illusions in exchange for full
membership in the loving community of consciousness that transcends self,
ideology, tribe, ethnicity, and nation.
Over
Our Shoulder
In Carlos Castaneda’s wonderful, controversial account of
his apprenticeship with the Yaqui shaman Don Juan, death played a prominent
role. Don Juan taught Castaneda that our death is always present, lurking just over
our left shoulder. Knowing he is always there, like a good friend, we acclimate
to his close proximity. We get used to him always being around. His nearness
frees us from the pettiness of our lives. We get better at letting the little
things go. With death as a constant companion, our priorities shift, our values
clarify, and our courage tempers into steel. We quickly drop perceived slights
(since there is no more ego to defend), and move instead into the consciousness
of forgiveness and gratitude. Every moment becomes a shining, singular miracle
– a gift of infinite grace. In the words of the Jewish mystic Abraham Joshua
Heschel, the world becomes “bereft of triteness.” Banality transforms into
significance. Boredom becomes impossible.
But if you are unwilling to make friends with your own
death – your own fluidity, your own impermanence – you close yourself off from
its gifts. You sentence yourself to a life of illusory self-importance,
confusion, suffering, and disappointment. The fullness of the beauty of the
world eludes you, the grandeur of human creativity evades your grasp, and the
delirious depth of love remains only a rumor, not a lived experience. Our death
is always hovering nearby, trying to cajole us into our own best lives. But we
keep running away, pretending he isn’t there.
Before
The Fall
This, after all, is the source of all our pathologies –
we think we have forever. We think there is always time. That tomorrow exists.
But it doesn’t. Not really. It exists only as an idea in our heads. It’s not
real. There is always only this now moment. And in the eternal present, all is
well – every fear unfounded, every longing met, every question mollified.
Instead, we idolize the past. Some of us live in the
illusion that everything used to be better, and long to return to the good old
days. We obsess about our looks and spend thousands of dollars on skin
treatments, hair color, cosmetics, and even surgery to turn back the clock,
mistakenly thinking that if we could be anywhere other than here, anytime other
than now, anyone other than who we really are, we’d be happy. What a torturous
pursuit.
Sure, blame the culture. Blame the cosmetics industry.
Blame the media. Blame advertising. Blame corporations. Blame Photoshop. But
they are just a mirror held up to our own fear, and our belligerent unwillingness
to make nice with our old friend death.
Summer’s winding down and soon the leaves will turn brown
and red and gold. They’ll fall in spirals to gather in drifts, clattering down
the street in the autumn wind. The days will grow shorter, the nights colder. Winter
is coming. We love the changes. But we fear them too. Because we know we only
have so many autumns left, so many winters. What if this is our last summer, our
last hot day? If we knew it was our last, would we waste it complaining? Would
we label it a hardship? Or would our hearts open laughing to delight in its
embrace? It’s never too late to awaken to the truth and renounce the illusion
of permanence. It’s never too late to really, fully come alive. All you have to
do is rehearse your death, and receive its gifts. All you have to do is know,
really know in your bones, that this is it.
