56 days to go...

I reflected on death and dying today. This is something I need to do in my journey to rebirth at 50, and for my life beyond that milestone.

Why so? It has to do with the quality of my life. By reflecting on dying, I know that I can experience changes in my heart and can adopt better habits in my life. I will get to know what is really important, and distinguish it from the filler and noise.

My intuition tells me that what I need to know about living and dying is already programmed and stored inside me. But I need to tap into that well of wisdom, and learn to listen to my inner voice. And to prime myself on the subject, I am now reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche.

According to this master, reflecting on death can lead us to “go through a powerful experience, and your whole world view can change quickly.” He said that contemplation on death can bring us a deepening sense of renunciation or rebirth. “The fruit of frequent and deep reflection on death”, he said “will be that you will find yourself ‘emerging’, often with a sense of disgust, from your habitual patterns.”

So reflecting on death has everything to do with how to live one’s life better, and that is what I am after in my quest for rebirth at 50.

Sogyal Rinpoche explained that death doesn’t happen just once. Life, he said, is a “continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death’s pulse, death’s heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to. So let us then work with these changes now, in life: that is the real way to prepare for death.”

Continuing his exposé on impermanence, he said that it “spells anguish to us”, and therefore we “grasp on to things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go.”

He urged us to take impermanence truly to heart, saying that it is “to be slowly freed from the idea of grasping, from our flawed an destructive view of permanence, from the false passion for security on which we have built everything.”

Taking his words to heart today was easy because they resonated strongly with my own sense of truth.

When we work with changes in our life that are inspired by a better understanding of impermanence, Sogyal Rinpoche said that we could taste the “elating truth of these words by William Blake:”

He who binds to himself a Joy,
Does the winged life destroy;
He who kisses the Joy as it flies,
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.”

From: “Eternity” in Blake: Complete Writings, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1972

I believe it. Death is intricately linked with life.

In the culture in which I was raised, death was held at maximum distance from our daily lives, loves, and activities. It seemed as though we were programmed to resist death and even the thought of it. In stead, all focus was on growth, beauty, strength, youth, and everlasting love and relationships.

Being reborn at 50 means I have to integrate death into my life. To learn to live fully, as if each day can be my last. Living that way is a celebration of each moment, each five minutes, each hour, each day.

My reflection on living and dying will continue.

Photograph: All smiles for a young Sogyal Rinpoche with his Master Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro