fully empty
It’s like there isn’t enough time. So much beauty. So many possibilities. And so little time. Is it time? More like attention. Bandwidth to experience. It’s like being at the world’s most intricately detailed parade. A mile-wide parade. 400 miles long. Varying themes and threads. Non-homogeneous and yet somehow whole. Delightful for all of the senses. Mind-blowing in its beauty and intelligence.
And you get to watch 8 hours of it. Only 8. From wherever you happen to be standing when the clock starts.
This is life.
Recently something opened in me that I’ve been bit-by-bit digesting the finiteness of my personal experience and the other side of that coin — everything. It’s not in a way I could really imagine before because it’s a new feeling. You can’t conjure up feelings you haven’t yet had.
The feeling is the awareness of this — the parade, that incomprehensible magnificent event is, absurdly, happening every moment. I don’t mean you watch a part of it every moment. I mean the whole thing. In this one moment. All of it is around and within you. Right now.
Our minds filter experience to fit the stories we’re running. As my personal narrative dissolved, expansiveness filled in. A tidal wave of awe. I cannot tell you how many times a day I’m blown away by mundane beauty, like the colors in a small square of moldy concrete bordered by bricks.
The surrender bit is kinda scary, at this moment anyhow. It’s not that I no longer care to live. It’s kind of like the opposite. I’m so enthralled with living that I’m too busy to be concerned about it. It’s like I don’t want to miss it by getting lost in any illusions of control. I’m not clinging to life anymore. Even this meta-level concern is quickly folding up because I’ve seen enough to know that contemplating any topic, even topics about topics, is just more illusion. A sly way to avoid the full awareness of here.
Standing in the embodiment of ‘I am here.’ burns through a lot of what you’ve been taught to carry, a lot you didn’t even know you were holding. It’s a call to presence that transcends conditioned hierarchies of importance, of promises of better laters and wishes for better versions of yourself and others. You feel the immediacy of Now, the importance of Here. It whites out all other humdrum mental toilings as you see that they are all just to get you to where you already are and always were.