Watching actors age

It’s two minutes to midnight. There are many thoughts on my mind. I hope that writing will help me organise my thoughts.

I struggle to begin. There is such a deep sense of dissatisfaction now, but it is momentarily salved by these words on the monitor laptop screen. Yes, you are dis-satisfied, Pheng Heong.

Only the Buddha’s (purported) words assure me that what I am experiencing is fundamental to the human experience of existence.

I went into a movie theatre with the mentality that a film is but an aspect of the illusory nature of reality. It will end, even as it begins. I will be left wanting, after it is over.

My parents and sister seem interested and pleased with the film. They asked me how I found it. Whether it was a good movie. How do I explain to them that I don’t wish to talk about something that is an illusion?

I manage a quasi-Buddhist question in response to my sister’s question: “Why do people age?”

I thought about many things after the movie ended. One of them was that my father might require help with his bathroom hygiene in the future. Sickness. Old age. I, too, will be sick and old.

I thought about how my family ended up being my family. Some say that my family is the result of a karmic debt from past lives. What if someone cooked up this explanation to persuade people to take care of their immediate family for the rest of their lives, in the name of clearing a karmic debt? What if this explantion is historically unreliable? But what if it is true? What then?

I can’t be old at the same time as my father is old. Not yet, anyway, given the current state of technology. Maybe one day with cryogenic technology, that will be possible. But for now, I can only remind myself that I will be as old as he, as I look at my aging father.

Impermanence is a big word. Things don’t last although we think they ought to. I struggled with accepting, no, comprehending impermanence. Why do people start pet projects if they are doomed to die, or otherwise leave the project? How should I blog, when I am aware that I will die, or that the blog will otherwise disappear from my perception, say, by a machine fault?

I am saddened at the thought of my death.

We want things to last. Impermanence tells us they won’t. I don’t want it to be true. I feel anger. Why does G!d, or the powers that be, make us work in futility?

I am dis-spirited.

You are dis-spirited, Pheng Heong.

Yes, I am.

You are confused. You’ll be in a better place soon.

Ought I accept my lot in life?

What kind of things can I make anyway, given that all things are impermanent?

The only refuge that I can imagine is the Dharma. Talking about the nature of things reality is preferable over making sense of reality.

But some part of me is aware that the Dharma cannot teach me the way out of suffering, and that direct experience is a safer bet when the prize is stopping suffering.

I am suffering. We are suffering.

Maybe, what I need is time to accept that we are all suffering.

What, then, can I do, given that all persons are suffering? (I can’t conclude that all forms of life are suffering. I can’t answer if insects experience suffering.)

I read that compassion means to suffer alongside.

Is that all I can do? What else can we do when we are suffering?

Zen meditation is one way that people spend their time. “I’ve wasted my life on meditation,” a significant-person-in-Zen-history said. I feel that our experience with Zen meditation is an intensified experience of life. When he said he’s wasted his life on meditation, he probably means that if he could do any other conceivable thing with his life, he would have wasted his life on that, too. In another example, I get impatient during meditation: why aren’t I enlightened yet? Why aren’t I experiencing a moment of wisdom? Applying that experience to life, I am impatient with reality, too: Why aren’t I somewhere yet?

Maybe that’s why people meditate in Zen. Whatever experience you have is a microcosm in itself. Maybe, if I can find a way to handle the Zen meditation, I will find a way to handle life, too. Maybe the ideal state is the state of non-thinking, when you “just meditate”, as Zen texts have put it. Then maybe you can “just live” and “just exist.”

I read a passage in a Zen text about what I assumed to be non-thinking. It goes as follows. When can a goat and a tiger look each other in the eye, and be still? When a stone goat faces a stone tiger. The stone goat does not flinch when it sees the tiger. The stone tiger does not pounce on the goat out of hunger. (What if this is some crap that some f*ggot made up to persuade people to sit in Zen meditation for long periods of time?)

Maybe one has to take faith that there will be a state of non-thinking, when every reaction will be a fresh (child-like) response to life. (Is that the ideal state in Zen) Then maybe one can “just live”, “just grow old”, “just fall sick”, and “just die”.

And “just suffer”. And “just be impermanent”. And “just be dis-satisfied”. Then maybe I can “just watch a movie”.