THE DOORWAY TO POSSIBILITY

It is almost banal to say so, yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.

— HENRY MILLER

As I washed his back, Joe turned toward me, glanced over his shoulder, and said resignedly, "I never thought it would be like this."

"What?" I asked.

"Dying."

"What did you think it would be like?"

He sighed. "I guess I never really thought about it."

Joe's regret at never having reflected on his own mortality was a greater cause of suffering than his terminal lung cancer.

The great Korean Zen master Seung Sahn was famous for saying, "Soon dead." A wry wake-up call.

Death is the elephant in the room. A truth we all know but agree not to talk about. We try to keep it at arm's length. We project our worst fears onto it, joke about it, attempt to manage it with euphemisms, sidestep it when possible, or avoid the conversation altogether.

We can run, but we cannot hide.

There is an old Babylonian myth, "Appointment in Samarra," which W. Somerset Maugham retells in his play Sheppey. A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for supplies. But the man returns a short while later empty-handed, pale, and shuddering with fear. He tells his boss that a woman in the crowd bumped into him. When he looked at her more closely, he recognized her as Death.

"She looked at me and made a threatening gesture," the servant says. "Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there, Death will not find me."

So the merchant lends his servant his horse. The man rides off in a wild fury.

Later, the merchant goes to the marketplace to buy his own supplies. There, he sees Death and asks why she threatened his servant earlier that day.

"That was not a threatening gesture," Death replies. "It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

Like Joe, when we turn a blind eye to the inevitability of death, it takes us by surprise. Yet even running in the other direction, we always arrive at her door. Death only sneaks up on us because we haven't noticed the clues she has hidden in plain sight.

Mostly, we imagine death will come later. No sense worrying about it too much now. "Later" creates the comfortable illusion of a safe distance. But constant change, impermanence, is not later. It is right now. Change is the norm.

We set ourselves up for great disappointment when we cling, hoping that things will never change. It is an unreasonable expectation of life. When I was a teenager, my father would remind me often to "enjoy every moment. It goes by in a blink." I didn't believe him. A few years later, my mother died. I didn't have a chance to say good-bye, to tell her I loved her as I would have liked. I had been living in a kind of dream. I lived within the confinement of that regret for many years.

George Harrison told the truth when he sang, "All things must pass." This moment gives way to the next. Everything is vanishing before our eyes. This is not a magic trick. It is a fact of life. Impermanence is an essential truth woven into the very fabric of existence. It is inescapable, perfectly natural, and our most constant companion.

A sound comes and then it is gone. A thought arises and then quickly passes away. Sights, tastes, smells, touch, feelings — they are all the same: impermanent, fleeting, ephemeral.

My blond hair is long gone. Gravity is having its way with me — my muscles are weaker, my skin has less elasticity, my bodily functions have slowed. This is not a mistake. It's part of the natural process of aging.

Where is my childhood? Where is last night's lovemaking? All that is here today will be only a memory tomorrow. Intellectually, we may understand that our mother's treasured vase will one day fall off the shelf, the car will break down, and those we love will die. Our work is to move this understanding from our intellect and to nestle it deep within our hearts.

Evolution shines a light on this immutable law when it reveals change on vastly different scales, from the micro to the macro. The magnification of an electron microscope reveals the miraculous structure of a human cell. The nucleus, the oscillating field, the waves of rhythm, protons, neutrons, even smaller particles in constant flux, living and dying moment to moment.

Looking through the Hubble Telescope, we observe the same dynamic. Our ever-expanding universe is subject to the same processes. True, planets may live longer than human cells. The sun will likely continue on as it is now for many billions of years. But impermanence is a characteristic of even the vastest galaxies. They come into form from large clouds of gas, atoms bind together, and, at some point, stars are created. In time, some fade away and some explode. Much like us, galaxies are born, they live for a time, and then they die.

* * *

Years ago, a friend and I started a small preschool program. Occasionally, we would take the three- to five-year-olds into the nearby woods with the task of finding "dead things." The children loved this game. They would happily collect fallen leaves, broken branches, a rusty old car part, and occasionally the bones of a crow or small animal. We would lay these discoveries out on a big blue tarp in a grove of fir trees and have a sort of show-and-tell.

At their young age, the children had no fear, only curiosity. They would examine each item carefully, rub it between their fingers, smell it — exploring the "dead things" in a close-up and personal way. Then they would share their thoughts.

Sometimes they would craft the most amazing stories about the history of an object. How a rusty car part had fallen from a star or spaceship as it passed above, or how a leaf was used as a blanket by a mouse until summer came and it was no longer needed.

I remember one child saying, "I think the leaves that fall from trees are very kind. They make room for little new ones to grow....