Alanis Morissette

We are but a breath,
a flash, a vapor.
We're here and gone;
often unknowing of when
we will disappear
into the clouds.

The brevity is real;
you will not survive this life.
It will bury you into the dust,
the mystery from which you came.

One day you, yes, you,
will cease to exist.
You will simply no longer be
alive and well on this planet earth.
The only world you've ever known
will be pulled out from
under your feet.

Death takes all prisoner.
None get out alive.

We are fleeting.

words that have influenced my mind this week:

"I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time..."

-Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I've always wondered what it would be like to live the life of another. Why I was placed in this body at this point of time, I do not know; and I will not know until I acquire the answers when I go somewhere greater, maybe God will tell me. But to live your own life with the curiosity of what it would be like to live the life of another - this can be both a futile and sympathetic curiosity. Futile in the sense that it will never happen. We can be compassionate and attempt to understand another human's life, but at the end of the day, we are still ourselves, and that is who we will remain. But it is also sympathetic; we can gain a sense of empathy and favor for the person's life that we are desiring to live as, to be placed in their shoes is extremely different from observing their life and creating our own ideas about what it would be like. 

Sylvia Plath said it right - we can not overlook our own lives, our own frailty, or our own subjective experiences because we are preoccupied, wondering what it would be like if we were another. 

"Do you know, 

that every day's

the first of the

rest of your life."

- Thriving Ivory, Angels On The Moon

Yes, I knew that. But have I thought about it? No. 

I can feel the brevity of my life, I can feel it slipping away, I am incapable of making it stop. And I hate that. 

But I am amazed at our ability to create our lives, to put our past behind us and step ahead.

When I hear the phrase "the rest of your life" I think of it as a whole. I hear people often asking, "what are you going to do with your life? What are the plans for the rest of your life?" I think that when I hear this (and I am assuming that this happens to others, too), I automatically assume that we are referring to the future, what is to come, instead of what is right here, right now. 

This moment right here, this living, breathing moment, is the rest of your life. Not tomorrow, not next week, it is right here. You are living it.

The rest of your life is a continuum of every moment that you life from this point on. 

This is a radical concept to understand; and if more of us did, it would change the way we live. 

Have you felt life lately?

I'm asking you,

have you stopped to just feel it?

To peer up into the world you are inhabiting. 

To feel breath as it enters, exits, as it sustains you.

To stand in contentment and notice your frailty.

To be quiet with your emotions, let them be.

To feel one with something greater. 

You are here;

you are now.

Feel your existence,

because it's the 

truest aspect of life

that we know. 

a bewildered mind at 2 a.m.

I am amazed at the fact that every time I lie down to sleep, I am still the same person that I was yesterday. And the day before that. And as long as I've existed. I've always been myself, I'll always be myself. I am me. And not anyone else. I am incapable of being someone else. This seems like a simple and silly and obvious though, but it's not. It's quite dynamic, really.

I go through many changes in a day, so many shifts and tears and emotions. How can I possibly be the same person that I was the day before? Life is shifting, moving, it is never stagnant.

Maybe we do change who we are. Maybe we change when we are shaped by our circumstances and by things that we have no control over. And we do change our physical appearance and we do change our attitudes. And we do change when we have a broken heart. And I suppose we change when we fall in love. And I've seen a human meet God, and I've seen that human change and become quite different.

But there's something inside us (or I'd like to think that there is) that is unchanging, it will not shift. It is constant; it is the essence of who we are. You are only you. There will never be any other you. You are the only you that you can be. And yes, as humans we will be shaped by the life swirling around us, and we will change and become different as we were before. Our qualities and traits are not static; you may gain more joy, your mind may grow in darkness. The human will meet God, the human will lose someone they love, the human will fall head over heels in love, the human will gain a new passion for nature, the human will be angered beyond words, the human will be lonely. Humans experience countless changes. What is beautiful is that in the midst of all these changes, the human is still itself. It has something that can never be taken away - the essence of its being.

I live in my body and experience in my body, but I am not my body. There is a spirit within me that is beyond my body, beyond my mind, and in that spirit lies the answer - the answer to how we can lie down at the end of the day and still be ourselves.

There is an intrinsic nature to humans, very much lovely, very much to be appreciated, very much full of God. We are who we are, and that can not be taken from us.

There's a guilt in surviving.
There's a guilt in going on
and living life
when the one that you love

is gone.

Dhammapada - Buddhist scripture