Some time ago someone recognized the importance of impermanence, of the beauty and inevitability of change. The Japanese call it “mono no aware” (the ahh-ness of things) the Romans called it, “the tears of things” as if our very belongings could feel the melancholy of having been made from dust and the transience of their own creation.
I’ve had a long time to consider the value of memory and the notion that just because something doesn’t last forever it’s value is not diminished. There is a certain attractiveness to impermanence - that there are some things so fleeting as to demand our attention then and there. As if forever could be crystallized in a moment and we would emerge from the moment and carry it with us throughout our life, perhaps gently saddened by it’s passing but almost certainly grateful. It is gratitude that sustains us and moves us forward to the next and the next moment. Life seldom gives us tidy endings or tidy middles for that matter, it only gives us gratitude for having noticed it.
I guess it’s incongruous to compare the long life of my mother to a moment. There were, in fact, millions and millions of moments. So many that they became familiar, so many that I learned to anticipate them. That she would wake me every morning with “Good morning to you. Good morning to you. You look like a monkey and you smell like one too!” Or that every trip would end with, “Home again, home again, jiggity jig.” In many ways she is the voice inside my head. In many ways her eyes are the eyes through which I see the world. We shared so many moments, she and I, so many that I’ve forgotten most of them and she, before she went, forgot all of them. Perhaps that is my greatest sadness, that in the end she was so completely emptied, that not even a single one of her treasures could have remained to give her comfort. Her life was filled to overflowing with blessings and then slowly, slowly each one was wrung out of her. Like autumn leaves dropping from her mind, freed at last to run, skipping across the forest floor.
There is a certain temptation to leaning on the idea that all of our treasures will be waiting for us in heaven. That we could have stored them in a place where time and decay could not reach them. That there would at last be a final resolution of our angst. Everything gone would be restored and everything lost would be found, but would that really be paradise? Wouldn’t we then have lost the beauty of impermanence? Wouldn’t we then be robbed of the ahh-ness of existence? What if instead there were no treasures at all? What if the greatest blessing was learning to not count our blessings but instead to let them go? To realize that the most important treasure is the gratitude for having been blessed in the first place.
Comments
Post a Comment