Recently seeing a park full of happy people enjoying a sunny Saturday had me smiling all the way home — and further. I’ve been smiling a lot this last year. Yes, life is good. My happiness may be strangely related to this blog.
In mid-April, the flight back from my regular visit to my daughter and family in Wenatchee, WA, was delayed three hours. I fell into a conversation with a yoga therapist. After briefly sharing our life stories, she mentioned that Buddhism teaches that accepting death brings joy. I had a sudden urge to cry and wondered what brought that on.
These blog postings began as my fumbling attempts to better understand this strange time of life, where we get close to ending this most amazing and incredible experience called living. The 76 postings (to date) on this site have followed an erratic meandering path, each coming from a feeling or thought at the time of writing. Not following a set plan is deliberate as that would defeat my exploration of the unknown.
While I may be kidding myself, could it be that a surprising and wonderful benefit from this exploration of the end of life has been . . . . joy? I certainly didn’t plan or expect that.
Irving Yalom, Professor of psychiatry at Stanford University in his book Staring at the Sun, says that many of his patients who fear death have not had fulfilling lives. While we know our memories are reliably unreliable, my recollection is of a charmed life, fulfilling beyond measure. And now in retirement, I’m doing exactly what I want with family, friends, community volunteering, creative craft activities, chewing the cud, and writing.
An acquaintance recently told me she thought of herself as 20 or 30, not her actual age — which I’d guess is about 20 years older. I replied that I didn’t think of myself as an age but as happy. Later I thought that age thinking, and happy thinking are quite different views of the world. I’m happy with happy.
In the US we notoriously avoid discussing death and dying. But I believe that by exploring dying and accepting the end of life I have found great peace and joy. The possible irony of that makes me laugh. Out loud. Now.
“Often
Happiness calls,
but
we are too busy to answer.”
(Joan Anglund)
Thank you for reading.
Barry
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