"The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves. Until one day there are none... No hopes, nothing remains..." Nitta Sayuri "Memoirs of a Geisha"

At the temple, there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read Loss, only feel it. (The old Sayuri)

"Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?" -Erasmus

our only lasting possession

Reflect on this: The realisation of impermanence is paradoxically the only thing we can hold onto, perhaps our only lasting possession. It is like the sky, or the earth. No matter how much everything around us may change or collapse, they endure. Say we go through a shattering emotional crisis … our whole life seems to be disintegrating … our husband or wife suddenly leaves us without warning. The earth is still there; the sky is still there. Of course, even the earth trembles now and again, just to remind us we cannot take anything for granted …

Even Buddha died. His death was a teaching, to shock the naïve, the indolent, and complacent, to wake us up to the truth that everything is impermanent and death an inescapable fact of life. As he was approaching death, the Buddha said:

Of all footprints

That of the elephant is supreme;

Of all mindfulness meditations

That on death is supreme.

Whenever we lose our perspective, or fall prey to laziness, reflecting on death and impermanence shakes us back into the truth:

What is born will die,

What has been gathered will be dispersed,

What has been accumulated will be exhausted,

What has been built up will collapse,

And what has been high will be brought low.

The whole universe, scientists now tell us, is nothing but change, activity, and process - a totality of flux that is the ground of all things:

Every subatomic interaction consists of annihilation of the original particles and the creation of new subatomic particles. The subatomic world is a continual dance of creation and annihilation, of mass changing into energy and energy changing to mass. Transient forms sparkle in and out of existence, creating a never-ending, forever newly created reality.

[Sogyal Rinpoche, 'The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying']

Pay attention, this is important: Bruce Lee, the famous Jeet Kune Do martial artist said it like this:

“The medicine for my suffering I had within me from the very beginning.”

This is incredibly important, because it says you already have the tools inside your mind to bring you happiness. You have to look inside yourself for the answers to what ails you. Nothing material is the solution. It is all 100% mental, all 100% good attitude.

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself?  If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.  One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."  - Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Bruce Lee also held that “there is no such thing as an effective segment of totality.” While this is a “deep” comment, it is really simple. We cannot say that we have the answer to anything in a simple explanation. Any belief system that claims the complete answer is only a delusion. There are no opposites, only interconnected facets of the existence of which all of us are a part.

I have paraphrased heavily from Bruce Lee’s book Jeet Kune Do, Injecting my interpretations as necessary.

Everyone dies. Only the lucky ever truly Live. Take your time. - Chris-Bishop, CA, USA

Too many people put off something that brings them joy just because they haven't thought about it, don't have it on their schedule, didn't know it was coming or are too rigid to depart from their routine. I got to thinking one day about all those women on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night in an effort to cut back. From then on, I've tried to be a little more flexible. How many women out there will eat at home because their husband didn't suggest going out to dinner until after something had been thawed (who cares with a little comunication)? Does the word "refrigeration" mean nothing to you? How often have your kids dropped in to talk and sat in silence while you watched 'Jeopardy' on television? I cannot count the times I called my sister and said, "How about going to lunch in a half hour?" She would gas up and stammer, "I can't. I have clothes on the line. My hair is dirty. I wish I had known yesterday, I had a late breakfast, It looks like rain." And my personal favorite: "It's Monday." ...She died a few years ago. We never did have lunch together. Because people cram so much into their lives, we tend to schedule our headaches.. We live on a sparse diet of promises we make to ourselves when all the conditions are perfect! We'll go back and visit the grandparents when we get Stevie toilet-trained. We'll entertain when we replace the living-room carpet. We'll go on a second honeymoon when we get two more kids out of college. Life has a way of accelerating as we get older. The days get shorter, and the list of promises to ourselves gets longer. One morning, we awaken, and all we have to show for our lives is a litany of "I'm going to," "I plan on," and "Someday, when things are settled down a bit." When anyone calls my 'seize the moment' friend, she is open to adventure and available for trips. She keeps an open mind on new ideas. Her enthusiasm for life is contagious. You talk with her for five minutes, and you're ready to trade your bad feet for a pair of Rollerblades and skip an elevator for a bungee cord. My lips have not touched ice cream in 10 years. I love ice cream. It's just that I might as well apply it directly to my stomach with a spatula and eliminate the digestive process. The other day, I stopped the car and bought a triple-decker. If my car had hit an iceberg on the way home, I would have died happy. Now...go on and have a nice day. Do something you WANT to......not something on your SHOULD DO list. If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting? Make sure you read this to the end; you will understand why I sent this to you. Have you ever watched kids playing on a merry go round or listened to the rain lapping on the ground? Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight or gazed at the sun into the fading night? Do you run through each day on the fly? When you ask "How are you?" Do you hear the reply? When the day is done, do you lie in your bed with the next hundred chores running through your head? Ever told your child, "We'll do it tomorrow." And in your haste, not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch? Let a good friendship die? Just call to say "Hi"? When you worry and hurry through your day, it is like an unopened gift....Thrown away... Life is not a race. Take it slower. Hear the music before the song is over.

I don't know who wrote this, but its great isnt it?

These are Leg Cuffs from Guantanamo. While we go about our lives, others have to wear these. I have no idea why I put it in here. Oh yeah! To startle you.