Another day to enjoy

Nature contains Nature,
Nature rejoices in her own nature,
Nature surmounts Nature;
Nature cannot be amended but in her own nature.

Sometimes in life, we have to make choices. We stand at a crossroad, we have to pick one way or the other. We’d like to forget it all, start over, erase, delete. Yet  we are not computers, and deleting would be too easy. The truth is that we can not forget, the choices we make become part of who we are, and the only thing we can do is to live with our decisions. The yoga tradition calls it sanskara, the modern science calls it cellular memory. If the yoga tradition speaks of previous life imprints, I figure that dealing with one life is already complicated enough, the next life will come soon enough, and I can’t recall anything about before. After all, it seems that in one life, we already have so many lives, why ask too many questions to which we can only get more confusing answers? The rest, we’ll call it art.

So, I sit, and I watch my mind doing it’s gymnastic. Yes, no, this way, that way, no, yes, the mind jumps here and there, unstable, changeable, the mind appears like a silly puddy to which we have to give shape.

Sometimes, the best is to let go. Let go of the burning desires, let go of the ego, let go. This too shall pass, another moment in time, another shape, another life. Pick up the pieces of the puzzle and rearrange them. Other times we have to fight, fight for what we believe in, fight to not let life crush us, fight for our right to paaarty! Keep on walking, what choice do we have? If we can’t forget, we can learn from our mistakes. But to learn, it takes deep introspection. To learn, it’s inside ourself we have to go, inside where the silly puddy takes so many shapes that it’s easy to get lost in them. The mind gets pulled apart, ripped in a thousand pieces. Desires come alive, they take shape only to disappear again into the ocean that is the mind. Watch the waves, surf, and watch them go back down. The waves are like the emotions that come and go. The ocean contains them all, the anger, the fears, the sadness, the joys, pleasures and moments of happiness. Let it go, make your choice, the clouds will pass and come again only to let it rain for the blue sky to reappear in the dance of seasons.

Let go, let go. We can sit, breathe, be zen as they say. Sit, sit, sit and breathe. Turn the ideas in your head around and upside down, watch them dance in your head until they disappear in the clouds. Like a leaf growing on a plant, nature takes it’s course. Let the leaf fall to the ground, for the next one to sprout, but don’t hold on. After the dark Night of the Soul, something new comes along, something that feels like peace. The fight is over, the waves come down, and the light of the sun can rise again in the depth of the soul. As a new born baby, as someone who comes down from a psychedelic trip, life starts again, fresh, unspoiled. We seem to wake up from a dream, and we start a new dream. From dream to dream we wake up, another life, another day. We can’t forget, ever. It would be too easy to forget. But we move on, we die a little only to be reborn, it’s another day. If we can understand this process, it goes on more smoothly, until eventually, the process isn’t a struggle anymore. We have then become wise, a nice way of saying that we don’t care, the leaf fell to the ground, a new leaf is born. A cell is dead, a new one is born.

This process seem to have no end nor beginning, we’ll call it life. A process full of death, demons and gods, full of emotions and all that makes us what we are. If some claim that we can transcend the whole thing, I wonder what exactly there is to transcend. There is nothing to transcend, there is just life to be lived, might as well live it happilly. We can create our own hell, or we can choose more peaceful states, it's a choice of every day. We can think that we can forget, burry everything under a layer of our mind, hiding the emotions under rationalizations and other products of the mind, but what is not digested will become our stress, our cancers and other symptoms of the body speaking louder than the mind. We can ask a million questions, try to understand the why’s of the how’s, but at the end of the day, the mind stays with no answers to our questions. So better to just live and enjoy the mystery we call life, simply a day at a time. Be nice to people, don’t hurt others and all that nice stuff, or at least try your best. Better enjoy the body when it’s still working, better run, cry, laugh, sit, better live. Go save the world, climb a mountain, work to death, love and hate, write poetry or paint the world, but live. As many words as we can say, words can never fully express the complexities of the mind. Some say that if you want peace, you’d better drop the mind. Drop this machine designed to make everything more complicated than it is. This too shall pass, it’s another day to enjoy. And sometimes, it’s enough to laugh, just laugh at the whole thing, for after all, it’s quite an amazing circus.

Pictures from Panam.