Your Isle Of Peace

The start of every life is the birth where we commence to listen and remember. The end is that death that follows the birth. We thus experience something in between, and call it life, because we have lost our faith in the ability to know what was before and what is beyond, both of which are not part of the past nor the respective future, but of the present, that gift which keeps on giving because we ask it to. We are reminded that there is little power in our projection or our memories compared to the moment that we live in now, it being eternal.

Change happens. Street lights light up near evening and cease when the sun catches up. A friend waves from the bus as it wheels away in the same direction where you are going; from the footpath you can see their smile passing. The television delivers a short melody to announce its being turned on, and another before it slumbers on Standby. The comment you wrote on Facebook moves its way down the page as it gives way under the weight of Farmville and Mafia Wars notifications. Smiles :) are seen and left as the eye moves right along the row. In quick succession, cars drive on the street in front of your house as you remain watching from the window. The song you're listening to finishes and then another begins. Hair grows longer and escapes when severed. Pikachu faints because it was poisoned by a Weedle. Your birthday is celebrated with balloons, cake(s), candles, presents, chairs, a table, maybe alcohol, dancing, laughter, chatter, gossip, a spill, two arms holding, clinking, cheering. The clean-up is left up to the restaurant crew or your parents. Your day's one of joy. You are older, officially, and you deem yourself ready to step up and push further the brackets of your horizon, revealing more of what you want: more sunlight, more clouds, more hearts, more voices, more happiness. You feel you can fit more in because today is yours. Take it. Take it.

But don't hold on. Are you not enjoying it because you do not want it to go away? To leave you, to never return? Are you holding on? Stop. Live now, and do not clutch the fears that you are projecting into the future based on a past. Live your life.

Your fingers, wrap them not around an object lest you crush it under the pressure of your dread. I know you want to hold on, to not lose. But objects fall away, they fulfill a use, a purpose, then are discarded, for another purpose. Buildings, systems, grow in size and scope and crumble one day after their birth. With birth, death follows. A beginning, end. And it all happens within the eternal. No, nothing does not last forever, nothing cannot be. There is no thing that we can hold on to because once we hold on, we let go at some point.

Such is the lesson that we need to learn, that the world is impermanent. It changes constantly - thus the only constant is change. And this change, this movement, this process, is a gift. It is your present. Your isle of peace, wherein you can open your heart and cherish life for what it is. It is. Words start and end, and such is not life for it cannot be spoken. You live.