There is a natural
state, a kind of awareness that everyone experiences. This state, for good
reason, is rarely described. I suppose the experience, though very common, is
hard to capture with words. I know I feel daunted. The vulnerability that
attends existence isn’t felt and experienced the same by everyone. Words cannot convey fully what happens, or
what it is like. In fact, there seems to be a deep ambivalence that attends the
experience and protects one from it.
Regardless, of the
natural limitations that make this part of being human so impossible to convey,
I’m going to try to penetrate that ambivalence enough to refer to this facet of
being alive. I know I cannot do more. For, although I think our shared
existential vulnerability unites us, I am aware that what we commonly
experience does not easily translate into words. The condition that animates us
into existence, and attends to us throughout life, often evades us, precisely because
of its power in our lives. There is a natural reticence that comes with a deep
realization of how fragilely we are created. There is a state of paradoxical
nakedness that accompanies each of us no matter how well dressed our station in
life. The fact we are alive is so precious and so evanescent!
The vulnerability of
existence, the knowledge that each of us is here, and that we did nothing to
make it so, somehow sheers from us bravado, and reduces each of us into a
quivering mass of meat. This experience underlies everything. Whether a banker,
professor, miner, or street person with delusional thoughts, each can be
reduced to that same steaming heap of dust. There is humility and a implacable
justice that attends this leveling off. All are really nothing, and oddly and
inexplicably something. This is the raw state we share.
Recently, I heard
someone with a heart pacemaker describe waking up in the middle of the night,
with irregular heartbeats, and wondering if this is the moment, the way she was
going to die. I have reason to suspect that most of those reading these words
have had their own moments like this. Everyone knows our time could end any
moment and few of us live like that. I am writing about this, not because I
think we should be trying to live out each moment with this awareness. I do.
What motivates my
writing today is something quite different, I want to underscore the perpetual
fragility of all of our lives. This aspect of what we all share, brings out the
compassion in me, and most importantly, arouses awareness in me. I share the same mysterious origin as others,
I am related to them by virtue of the common mystery of our existence.
I find this fact of
life compelling. Underneath all of the differences I seem to have with everyone
there is this one commonality. We came from the same place. And we all are
going back there. No matter who we are, or how well we think we’ve lived and
loved, or honored any belief system, the truth seems to be, that we return from
where we never really left. All of us, are bounded by the unknown.
Existence is so
precarious, uncontrollable, and liberating, that it is a solace to me. It seems
that there is a built-in sense of community in our shared sense of
vulnerability. I can’t think of anything: ideology, religion, gender
identification or not, money, social prestige, intelligence, or particular
insight, that overrides.
