I Think Too Much
A person can spend her life always chasing the next moment; wishing for love, working for that career, putting a little extra sugar in her coffee. There's rarely a moment when she's not dreaming about the future or regretting the past, so there's rarely a moment she is truly alive.
We all chase after pleasure and flee from pain. Gautama 'Buddha' was perhaps the first to discover this as the reason we feel suffering in the first place. It's the natural way to be, an instinct within every creature to keep chasing after the next pleasure; it has kept us alive as a species, but we can surmount our biology, we can stop this journey of running in circles, stand still, and once we do we'll realize that we don't have to chase after the future, we don't have to be a pig with a carrot dangling in front of us. If we just stop, we'll see that the carrot doesn't get any further away.
Life is a river, time continually pulls us along with the current. Most people can't stand the cold water, so they swim against the flow with all their might. Eventually, it works, the water no longer feels so cold as we exhaust ourselves to the point of death — like having a headache and trying to make it feel better by hitting your toe with a hammer.
If we stop trying to be happy, if we stop running from sadness, if we let ourselves feel what it means to be alive in this moment, those two struggles of life disappear. To live isn't determined by the past or the future, it never is, life exists in the moment.
There are only so many moments before our story is over, how many will we stop to appreciate and how many will we spend fantasizing about moments which will never come to be? We will never be 'ready' to die for as long as we struggle to live, but one who finds contentment in the moment will never be afraid of the inevitable, for she knows that she couldn't have lived with more vitality. She will have no regrets.
Let us live before our river runs dry. Let's exist, raw and real, right now.
We all chase after pleasure and flee from pain. Gautama 'Buddha' was perhaps the first to discover this as the reason we feel suffering in the first place. It's the natural way to be, an instinct within every creature to keep chasing after the next pleasure; it has kept us alive as a species, but we can surmount our biology, we can stop this journey of running in circles, stand still, and once we do we'll realize that we don't have to chase after the future, we don't have to be a pig with a carrot dangling in front of us. If we just stop, we'll see that the carrot doesn't get any further away.
Life is a river, time continually pulls us along with the current. Most people can't stand the cold water, so they swim against the flow with all their might. Eventually, it works, the water no longer feels so cold as we exhaust ourselves to the point of death — like having a headache and trying to make it feel better by hitting your toe with a hammer.
If we stop trying to be happy, if we stop running from sadness, if we let ourselves feel what it means to be alive in this moment, those two struggles of life disappear. To live isn't determined by the past or the future, it never is, life exists in the moment.
There are only so many moments before our story is over, how many will we stop to appreciate and how many will we spend fantasizing about moments which will never come to be? We will never be 'ready' to die for as long as we struggle to live, but one who finds contentment in the moment will never be afraid of the inevitable, for she knows that she couldn't have lived with more vitality. She will have no regrets.
Let us live before our river runs dry. Let's exist, raw and real, right now.
26-30, M
