Grasping sand



I suppose that the sequence we call time makes it so hat we cannot hold on to anything.  I have learned that the tighter I squeeze the more apparent this seems to become, the sand only seems to run out faster.  Perhaps holding on goes against the very fabric of reality leading to deep anxiety and fear.  I have a friend I am visiting with at this time.  He is 85 years old and starting to show signs of decline, which worries me a bit, for he is quite possibly the only mentor I have ever had.  He is a master at living and in showing compassion and love to all he meets.  He is a man who has traveled all over the world, speaks many languages and is known in influential circles.  Yet when he goes to a restaurant he treats the waiter or waitress with the same respect he showers on his powerful friends.  He can be very childlike in the best sense of the word and also a man of deep faith who lives it out quietly on a daily basis with no fanfare.  So I can get anxious when with him.  Is this the last time I will see him?  So I swim against reality, I fight temporality which only causes me to loss contact with what I have now.  Perhaps non-clinging is what truth is about.  In that we lose everything as we travel through life.  One little death after another, until the final one comes. Perhaps allowing the process is what leads to reality; that we hang over a void and one by one we must go into it, that dark door we call our demise. 

Where does the door lead?  No matter what faith we profess or philosophy, no one really knows what awaits us.  As a christian I have beliefs, but I have not had an NDE, so I go on faith and hope not on something I actually know.  Others believe in nothing after death, yet in the end the mystery remains.  St. John of the cross states that the closer we get to the infinite the darker it becomes because all images die, for the infinite is without form or content.  It is no-thing.  Language breaks down, it is almost impossible to talk about hence the misunderstanding that often happens when debate over the God issue is attempted.

Kubler Ross in a study found that the two groups that die most peacefully are those who live their faith and on the other side of the spectrum, those who believe in nothing and expect nothing after death.  It is the middle group that has the most trouble, those who believe but don't live it, or perhaps don't believe but do not really think it out.  In other words "practical atheist' have the hardest time dying.  Those who life 'as if' this is the only life, but have not thought it through.  

I find this to be true.  I have atheist friends who tell me they do not fear death, since they 'know' that there is simply nothing after they pass.  The same goes for my believing friends who live out their faith and also ponder it.  It is the non-pondering and the not deepening of ones beliefs that lead to a fear of death that can be truly overwhelming for some.  I am not speaking of agnostics in this paragraph, since they belong to a class all to themselves, and perhaps misunderstood more than both groups put together.

 
So ponder, think, talk with others who do, no matter what they believe.