Sometimes I just feel like writing a poem. 

For _____

Before you

Mine was the life of the mind

Stimulating love affair with the intellect

I plumbed heights and depths of thought and was content

Then you

No one prepared me for this!

And after all these years, I still

Can’t understand where this astonishing capacity came from

How it is possible that I can care so much

It hurts!

I pray for a heart strong enough to bear the pain.

I’ve been thinking a lot about barriers and boundaries recently.  For a while, I thought they were the same, but then I came to realize that they were quite different.  And actually now, I’m toying with the idea that barriers might not exist at all.

I got started on this particular exploration because I felt like I kept running into barriers.   You know them—rules, bureaucracies, laws of physics, etc.   I didn’t like being prevented from doing whatever it was I wanted to do.  I experienced the barrier as an obstacle to be gotten around somehow or—particularly when I was in a ferocious mood—demolished.   

One day, however, a revolutionary thought popped into my head: what if I stopped trying to circumvent or push through the barrier and instead investigated it. 

Now I’m in many ways a visual person, so in my mind I immediately saw a wall, and in my mind, I approached the wall with the intention of discovering as much as I could about it.  Imagine my surprise when, as I got closer, I began to see that the wall was not a solid monolith.  It had cracks and spaces.  And it wasn’t a thin, hard thing; it was wide and porous.

And then a really curious thing happened.  I began to see the barrier as a very dynamic place, a place where energy is being exchanged all the time.  Far from being static, it was always in flux.

I could see particles of energy moving in this wide band, leaving, joining, traveling within the borders, which were themselves more like those clouds I see in the sky, fraying at the edges.  It reminded me of a crowd of people, and suddenly, I knew how I could cross it.

All I needed to do was cooperate with it.  It was the most natural thing in the world!

I mean, if I want to get through a crowd, I could just throw myself at the edges of it.  I would probably be bounced backwards, maybe even fall down and hurt myself.   A better strategy would be to move into an opening, any opening I see, and then find my way, small space by small space, through the mass until I reach the other side.   And so what if my path is not a straight line?  Nothing in nature is a straight line!

And here’s something even more exciting.  As I feel my way through the crowd, the crowd itself, the flow of its very energy, can help me get through!

I bet you can see now why I’m thinking that there might not even be any barriers in life, just—let’s call them boundaries.  Because, after all, a boundary is just a border area where something ends and something else begins.  And if I want to get to the other side, it’s just up to me to find my way, step by step.

The email was sprung on me, an unexpected, unpleasant surprise.  It was from my brother.  His ex-boss, whom he considered also a friend – good man, devoted to his family, always upbeat and in good spirits – had died in a scuba accident.  He had retired 11 weeks ago.

I sat back in my chair, my heart hurting, tears coming. 

My reaction surprised me.  Yes, the death was tragic.  And yes, it was clearly sudden.  And yes, my brother had ended his email by saying the news was affecting him more than he thought it would, and he asked for prayers.

But why was I sobbing.  Why did I get up from my computer and start wandering through my house, wiping my hands across my face, massaging my forehead with my fingertips?

I heard myself speaking aloud, asking a question:  What are we doing?  We being Eddie and me.  What we are doing being delaying his retirement.  What if that happened to him?

I could hear the faint voice of my Buddhist training.  We live in the eternal present.  The length of time is irrelevant.  Every now moment is infinite, boundless.   11 minutes, 11 weeks, 11 years, 11 decades—it makes no difference in the eternal present.

I believe this.

And yet I feel grief-stricken.

What if Eddie’s eternal present never gets to retirement?  What if mine doesn’t? 

What if I spend my life preparing, lining things up, fulfilling requirements that I made up in my mind and then took to be existentially true?

Ah, this is an old argument.  In “Advice to My Son,” poet Peter Meinke says the trick is to live each day as if it is your last and yet plan for the future.  Plant flowers—and vegetables.  Serve bread with the wine.  But, he ends:

“… son, / always serve wine.” (li 22, 23)

Every so often, I must be reminded of the fiction of long life.  So I can practice—in Buddhist terminology—as if my hair were on fire. 

Practice what?

Serving the wine.   And drinking it.   And maybe sometimes pouring it on my head.   And grieving.

Meinke, Peter.  “Advice to My Son.”  Literature: The Human Experience.  9^th ed.  Eds. Peter Abcarian and Marvin Klotz.  Boston:  Bedford/St. Martins.  2006.   174-75.