Your Book of Life, Written by You (6): Spirituality
Nirvana, or the wanting to not have existed.
Hello, my friends,
Welcome to the final chapter of the book of our life: Spirituality.
Where shall we start?
Once upon a time…
Once upon a time, there was a desire.
A desire to exist. A desire to live. A desire to experience this world.
It was the sparkles in an infant’s eyes.
Then there was a shock:
The world is full of traps.
Life is hard!
We were caught in trouble. We felt the pain.
Sometimes it was a physical pain, but often times it was a pain caused by a voice in our head:
Oh no, I did that again!
Why this stupid machine doesn’t work?!
Why is this happening to me?
What’s wrong with me?
Many years ago on a train from Helsinki to Vaasa, a west port city in Finland, my schoolmates brought up the idea of reincarnations.
“What would you like to be, if you can choose your next incarnation?” They asked.
“Me? I’d like to get out of the cycle of rebirth.”
“Come on, just for fun! A king. A cat. A bird. If you could choose whatever life you want, what would you like to be?”
I glanced outside of the window. The train was running through a vast farmland, passing by patches of woods and glistening lakes. It might have been 8 or 9 PM at that time, still golden bright everywhere my eyesight could reach. It was a perfect day in the transient Nordic summer, a season when the plants along the railroad were soaking up as much prolonged daylight as possible, exhibiting their most saturated shade of green.
“I’ll be a rock, ” I said. Water would be fine too.
“A rock is not alive! You have to choose a form of life.”
I paused again, and said: “Let me be a tree then. I just want to be something immobile and has no feelings.”
My friends were speechless for a moment.
“That’s so sad,” someone offered a comment, and they moved on to other topics.
In the first 30 years of my life, no matter what positive outlook I wore outside, I was very gloomy inside. Good times never seemed to last. Glimpses of joy were like the Nordic summer. With the midnight sun hanging in the sky the day seemed to never end, and you summoned all your energy to bloom, only to find out that darkness lasted three quarters of the year.
My solution to pain was to escape. I would abandon a place and run away. I moved around the world not so much because I loved to travel, but because there was an unbearable history I wanted to leave behind.
The ultimate escape would be to sleep forever - which is to say, although I never attempted to kill myself thanks to my aversion to pain, I had often desired to not exist.
Why go through the trouble of living if we are gonna die anyway?
Why, Mother Nature, would you breathe life into us if you are going to destroy us anyway?
“That’s why I’m not going to have kids,” I told another childless friend over dinner, in a boutique Japanese restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. “If my kid asks me that question, I won’t be able to answer.”
By this time, I had done enough self-help work and had surrendered to the fact that I would continue to be alive - so keep calm and carry on - but I still couldn’t forgive the reality that I was given life without my permission. Surely I wouldn’t do this to another life.
“Well, if you look at this from a karmic point of view,” this friend swallowed a bite and said, “you can tell your kid, ‘hey, don’t look at me! I didn’t do it. In your previous life you weren’t enlightened enough to escape the rebirth. That’s why you had to come back and do this again.’”
Whoa.
I took a deep breath.
So I can’t blame Mother Nature, or my mother for that matter, after all.
“Smart.” was the only speech I could mutter.
“I know.” She took the last slice of the grilled duck breast. Life tastes delicious, if you bother to chew.
We asked for a refill of the shredded cabbage salad, and then went to a small theater nearby to watch a medium-comedy show, where we communed with the deaths for the next hour.
What did the deaths have to say to the living?
It’s okay to let go now.
I’m doing fine on the other side.
I love you.
Take care.
For no apparent reason, life keeps happening.
Life happens more effortlessly than death. I got blisters on my lips last week, this week new skin has grown from the wound. A dying trunk of the money tree found spots in its body to sprout new buds.
Every time when I laid down wishing that I never had to wake up again, I had successfully woken up and lived for another day.
Life rejects control.
It happens however it wants.
Instead of being shocked or scared, be curious about what happens. It’s all but a game. A game in which you are not playing against anyone. Not against your mother, not against society, not even against yourself. You were signed up for this game because in your past life you weren’t enlightened enough to enter nirvana.
If you want to get out of the rebirth cycle, you gotta play with life, not against it. Have fun with it. Have a laugh when you stumble. Have a laugh especially when you stumble.
All the anxieties and disappointments? They are part of the plot in the storyline.
Surrender.
Then keep playing
Okay! I think I’m enlightened now. Will I be released from the cycle of rebirth this time?
The Force of Life laughs out loud.
This concludes the last chapter of the book of my life. How about yours?
Thank you for reading thus far. If at any moment you felt inspired to take a closer look at your life, I feel utmost honored.
I will take a break from producing these heavily loaded letters. 😆 In the next few months I’ll focus more on illustrations.
Until then, take care!