Over the summer, Oliver Sacks, renown neurologist, naturalist and author, died of cancer at the age of 82. You might remember him best from the 1999 movie Awakenings where he was played by Robin Williams.
Upon learning of his diagnosis, he said:
I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
So often, it’s when faced with our own mortality that we are finally able to release the shoulds of our complex lives and focus on that which really matters. The love, the friendships, the activities and creativity that fills our hearts, souls and minds. To plan our time around what we truly value.
Why, though? Why wait?
It’s exactly this sense of intense aliveness in the here and now that Stephen Batchelor referred to during a recent episode of the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett. (This is the newest addition to my playlist and if you’re interested in a vast exploration of spiritual belief, give it a listen!)
His sense of aliveness is deepened and excited by a practice he learned from Tibetan Buddhist teachings. It’s a gratitude practice of sorts, one that goes straight to the meat of the matter, a no-holds-barred reflection on a critical truth of life:
Death is certain; timing of death is unknown.
I have yet to meet anyone who is instinctively stoked to meditate on death and yet it is, indeed, one of the few sure things in this life, one of the few things we all share, one of the great clarifying truths.
So I gave the meditation a go. Driving down the road, his interview still playing, I kept saying to myself, “Today could be my last day.”
In only a repetition or three, the frosty early morning sprang to life. Landscape that I drive by at least once a week was new to me. The muted sun offered a soft luminescence to the icy fields. I felt determined to address the tension plaguing one of my key relationships, and redoubled excitement for the clients I would get to work with that day and the home I would return to that night.
Hey presto!
What a potent reminder of the two kinds of fear: the kind that paralyzes us and the kind the focuses and grounds us.
When writer Anne Lamott received a call from her friend Sue with report of a fatal diagnosis, Sue said, “I have what everyone wants,” she said. “But no one would be willing to pay.”
“What do you have?” asked Lamott.
“The two most important things. I got forced into loving myself. And I’m not afraid of dying anymore.”
Equal to the illumination of life’s beauty is the spotlight on the ways we block ourselves from that best life.
In her book Small Victories: Spotting Improbably Moments of Grace, Lamott wrote:
“The worst possible thing you can do when you’re down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you.
First of all, friends like this may not even think of themselves as dying, although they clearly are, according to recent scans and gentle doctors’ reports. But no, they see themselves as fully alive. They are living and doing as much as they can, as well as they can, for as long as they can.
They ruin your multitasking high, the bath of agitation, rumination, and judgment you wallow in, without the decency to come out and just say anything. They bust you by being grateful for the day, while you are obsessed with how thin your lashes have become and how wide your bottom.”
In this, too, it is important to remember that there is no perfection in anything, including and perhaps especially this focus. Batchelor says that even he, with all of his years of Buddhist practice, is unable to stay in the focused beauty of this mortal meditation.
So when you find yourself ruminating about your widening bottom or feeling flames of anger or forgetful of the intense abundance of what is, right now, redirect yourself with love, not self-flagellation and shame.
We are, after all, mere mortals, perfectly imperfect humans, living imperfect and impermanent lives.
As Salvador Dali so wonderfully said:
“Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it.”
Is there anything more worthy of gratitude than that?