Ordinary life is a dance, work itself is a dance… it is a dance with time, a dance with need, staring poverty in the face and choosing to fight that possible future, to create instead a bountiful (or bountiful enough) future.
It is no life to live not realising that catastrophe is possible, that the safety and comfort of the present could suddenly turn to naught. It is no life to act as if pain and death do not exist. It is an empty life, a fearful life, because we deep down do know we could not get what we want… we can’t face that fact. We can’t face that reality is full of futures we might not wish to have. We want to hide with our heads in the sand, face away from the window of our room, just so as to avoid the ‘dark futures.’ We cannot look in the face of the pain and loss others we know face, or the pain and loss evident in history and in other places far away.
And when we fear pain and loss, we are the worst comforters to those who go through it. And then when we go through it, we know that since we didn’t wish to go deep into another person’s darkness and grief, nobody else will do that for us! It is what in our minds we think is normal- avoiding the pain and facing hard reality is normal to us, so we cannot grieve. We think we have to pull ourselves up from it, and that inevitably includes ignoring it, I have found.
It does not mean you can’t tilt your hat at its existence, say words that acknowledge that pain was there, but you can’t face it. You can say, detaching your heart from your words, that you’re sad that someone died. But if you were to look at it, you’d see that it opens up a whole train of thought that alludes to the fragility of life, which we hate to face. We wish to extend life, and because we are so hell bent on that, we cannot stare life in the face- part of knowing about life is knowing about death. You don’t know life unless you know that it could-have-not-been.
You can’t fully live if you do not face that life is that dance at the edge of death. Life could so easily be put out, like a bit of breeze puts a candle out all of a sudden. Life is as fragile as a candle’s light, as fragile as a crystal glass or a bit of expensive china. But also it is akin as precious, comparatively, as those things- we wish our lives, and the lives of those around us, to continue just as fervently, or rather much more fervently, as we wish for our precious crystal and china to last. We take care with our lives as we take care with a fragile object.
We should not be afraid to see that. It does no good to turn away from that fact, that any random accident could happen. It is all in the air around us to fear this fact, so we are addicted to safety, to finding all ways we can to prevent calamity, to prevent that little wind from coming and puffing out our candle of life, puffing out our fragile civilisation.
What if we stopped fearing this? How could it be better for us?
