[Exploring Life] One of the greatest failures of lifelong learning is to live an unlived life, or a life that in hindsight is filled with regret. How many of us in the twilight years of our life look back on it and feel a sense of loss? It is not that we don’t know we will die, but it is that we choose to ignore that glaringly obvious reality. Perhaps it is simply too uncomfortable. Perhaps we have simply become too insensitive to the experience of being alive. Or is it that we are just too busy? Are we too afraid to face death and dying? The reasons for the avoidance of our own impermanence vary, but the failure in learning remains constant — any failure to orient learning toward the inevitability of death and dying confines our experience of life to the mundane. The following poem resonates the essential value that a healthy orientation toward death can bring to our learning and life…
There is a sense of familiarity about these words. Many of us might be saying, “Yes, I know this.” We may read these words once, possibly feel some kind of relationship with them, only to eventually move back into that perpetual state of ignorance we call society. But what if we read them not merely to acknowledge them, but to be them. That is to say, what if we choose to move beyond mere comprehension of words through the meaning we create from them into the actual experience of them?
If we contemplate on the words with respect to our own lives, of we choose to own the essential responsibility that is embedded in them, then our learning becomes an act of personal transformation, rather than mere interpretation. The realization that we forgot how to live is obviously best learned early, rather than later in life.
Learning about death and dying is one of the most optimistic and positive uses of learning possible. Our ability to learn cannot evolve unless we face the inevitable in life, and one of those inevitable experiences is our own impermanence. Our lives are in a constant state of transition that universally result in the same end. Ignoring this means we are already dead to life. Society is mere addiction.
Time to go back to work now in order to perpetuate that somnambulistic busy-ness of the day. However, it is always good to remember that one day, for you and me, there will be no time to go back to.
