Life, and more life?

Jumbled words are probably going to pour out of this exercise, which I am approaching with some trepidation. I am someone who plans their life, who feels the need to control what is happening and I haven’t got a plan on what I am going to write about here, but here goes.

Life and death have been in my thoughts a lot lately, partly because the last of my grownups as I think of them passed away in the last month, and it would have been her 95th birthday on the 4th, two days ago. It is also to do with the fact that I am now in my 69th year which was the same age that my father passed away in. I don’t have a sense that I am about to die any time real soon though but there is more of my life to look back on than to look forward to if that makes any sense. I am having to let go of the notion that there is all this to do in front of me. Well there is I guess but my time options are limited.

I don’t think I’m scared of death but I would prefer not to linger on in decrepit old age but if that is my fate then so be it. I have the lessons of yinyang to sustain my belief that there is a cycle to everything and I must be reaching the peak of one of the cycles and heading into the start of the next, whatever that might be.

This is ok to be disassociated writing isn’t it?

The choices facing me are to clean up my affairs so that I can get into a position that will allow me to enjoy what time I have left with whatever faculties and conditions I may be in. I long to really concentrate on finding my voice through writing. I love finishing a piece and setting it free. Hence my taking up this course opportunity, to build up a practice of writing regularly, of making it a priority in my life, and how hard should it be to find another 20 minute block each day to just sit down and write.

Funny thing about the 20 minutes we have been assigned for this piece. I meditate most days and the way I have been taught is to meditate for 20 minutes. There is something about the 20 minute period I guess, a third of an hour and I know the world loves threes, the trinity in everything. For meditation it seems to be an ideal time, long enough for you to settle your thoughts and get into the depth of it. I remember when I first started meditating I found the time requirement a real problem and kept looking at my watch frequently to see how much time I had left, it seemed to take forever to complete the 20 minutes. Now I sometimes resent the timer going off at that mark and want to keep going. But of course I then start on with what I have to get on to in the day, the pets are waiting for breakfast, I am waiting for breakfast, all that minutiae of a day.

I had an interesting experience this morning in meditation. I was focussing on my breath and the thought rolls in, “I wonder what my last breath will be like” and just then the timer went off to signal the end of the mediation. Talk about timing, it did get my day started with a laugh.

I was going to say earlier but got off subject, that I am ok with accepting that my body will expire and return to nature one way or another. What I am curious about though is whether there really is a spirit of some sorts that continues on and the pragmatist in me finds that difficult to accept but the realist also finds that there are all manner of knowledge, facts, ways of being, that are almost certainly beyond the limited capacity that these feeble human brains are capable of ascertaining.

So I am starting to stay open to the fact that a spirit of some sort is there and is the energy connection that keeps this bag of puss and piss, as the Tibetans call the body, functioning and the departure of which is the point of death.

**  Stace says: This is my day 1 assignment on the Writing 101 course run by WordPress. The prompt was: Let’s unlock the mind. Today, take twenty minutes to free write. And don’t think about what you’ll write. Just write. The twist: Publish this stream-of-consciousness post on your blog.