My favorite discourse today – with a young foe

I can have a wish.  It is allowed, at least for the moment.  And since it is allowed, my wish is for everyone to slow down and stop.  Just for a minute.  Stop.  Breathe. Contemplate life and death and what each means.  This is a purely selfish wish, I am as guilty as the next person but I do find my moments in between my bursts of energy and it’s those moments that allow me access to the most calm and tranquil moments.  Moments that transcend hours and days and years of work and effort.  What power must be in those moments when I can, alone, achieve a feeling of peace and calm and happiness that all my hours of busy work and business have failed to provide for me and in just an hour, sometimes shorter, most times a little longer.

The beauty of this “wish” of mine, is that it’s mine and no one can argue it or take it away.  It reflects my desire for things to be different than they are while at the same time I understand that if things were different than they are I may not have the beauty of this “wish”.  I only think of this wish because I have seen and touched and have lived with my pain.  A pain not easily understood at first.  After all what have I to be pained about.  What have I, the master of my dominion, the successful owner, the builder, the drinker of fresh water and the beneficiary of limitless energy for my every whim and want.  What is it that I could possibly be pained about as I have no limits on my choice of what things there are in the world as I walk through cavernous storehouses piled high with brightly colored, full, engineered fruits and vegetables, no soil in sight.  What have I to be pained about?

Ahh but I have answered my own question and I am my own result of the having of all that I said above and to still feel pain is indication not of trouble, at least not at first, but of health.  Something is amiss, something is missing, something has been forgotten, there is a loss, there is a void, there is senselessness made sense.

I think that I am not the only one who feels the pain of life.  The pain of life has been with us since we have had the gift of consciousness.  However my pain is all that I can articulate and my pain is all that affects me and until I reach some kind of enlightened state it will be my pain that continues to shape, in some way, my actions in the world.  So I ask myself, what is this pain?

It is the pain of arrogance.  It is the pain of one who has known the greatest powers of the spirit and who has traded them away.  It is the pain that burns deepest in the solitary basement of human emotion, the pain of being born and the confusion that embraces a child who come, crying into a cold world only to be lifted to his mothers breast and loved.  But how is the child loved.  And what does it mean to be loved.  Immediately upon bringing a child into the world the mother (and father) direct onto it everything that they hope and fear and dream creating a sentimental framework from which this child will place and relate all of his discoveries.  From birth the child is destined to feel the pain of the infallible human spirit trying to escape from it’s human framework.

But that is not why I wish for everyone to stop and take a breath and contemplate their life and their death.  I want that because, simply, it would be so much easier that way than the way which we are choosing now and because, perhaps, there are souls who will never have the chance to know the infallible human spirit in any way other than their pain because their human framework will be so deeply structured, so tightly wound and locked that to discover the source of the pain, which is the cause of all freedom, will be possible for only the heartiest of spirits.  But, perhaps, I have talked myself out of my wish in the first place, just now…how wonderful.