Dear Brave-Hearted Reader,
Slip slidin’ away
Slip slidin’ away
You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away
- Paul Simon
I remember starting off last year (like it was yesterday actually, and not some 370+ days ago), having my fancy quite taken by the fact that I was in the mood for resolutions. It had been a long time since I’d had any inclination whatsoever towards setting such things at any point in time, let alone at the supposed ‘right time’ of New Year.
But the beginning of 2024 saw me all bright eyed and bushy tailed on the subject of things I wanted to achieve in the year ahead. Funny thing is ….. don’t ask me what any of them were now, or whether I achieved them. The pertinent point is that I felt like setting them, and that was what mattered. Accomplishing them, or not, didn’t rob me of the chutzpah to lay them out in front of me with joie de vivre.
This new year has an almost polar opposite, yet subtly related feel to it. In the dying days and weeks of 2024 I began a project that I expect to last my remaining lifetime, however much of that I have. I’ve called it Simplify my Life. It has a sub-title: Swedish Death Cleaning. And now, as I leave the verdant vale that houses Bodhi Khaya Retreat Centre nestled alongside Platbos Forest, my project is fuelled, literally energised by newly gained understanding from the Buddhist perspective of impermanence: namely the nature of reality.
I have begun 2025 as I intend to continue, having spent 3 nights and two-and-a-half days under the guidance of a Tibetan trained South African born Buddhist monk named Chodon. For anyone who has not been to Bodhi Khaya – the venue for our retreat – it is a nearly impeccable encounter with the Component of Place. On arrival, the invitation is to slow down into ease, and to receive attention to your needs. Upon meeting Chodon I felt I mattered, and at every point of my benefitting from his teaching that impression was confirmed.
Without knowing the first thing about The Thinking Environment, he knows a great deal about how to be one and how to create one. The topic for our time together was Befriending Impermanence and Cultivating Gratitude. I could not have asked for more pertinent input to support my intention for 2025 and beyond.
The retreat confirmed many themes that have arisen in my newsletters in 2024, and even prior to last year. For some time now I have been sensing into impermanence. And since I re-started my meditation practice 7 years ago, I have also been grappling with the jarring challenge of how to sustain the peace and equanimity I can accomplish whilst meditating and transfer it into the living of my day to day life.
Becoming intimate with the nature of reality which is impermanence is the pathway to resolving this challenge. Expecting things to last is a fool’s errand – and I’m afraid to say a lot of us, myself included, are therefore fools. How much time do we spend trying to shore ourselves and our lives up against this inexorable truth. Things fall apart. With the ultimate falling apart being that of our bodies when we die.
Far from this being a morbid exploration, it is extremely liberating. Especially when navigated through the profound paradox I discovered lives at the heart of Siddhartha Gautama’s teaching. Everything is impermanent apart from one thing. And this one thing is the already-always existence of purely being. That which we all (and all things) are before we become all the accolades and achievements and identities we add on to ourselves in the course of our lifetimes. Never mind the possessions! And then exhaust ourselves seeking to maintain and sustain them: in the face of their inevitable decline and dissolution.
Gaze into the eyes of a newborn to know what I am talking about. There you are in the presence of a being-guru.
So, in brief, what I learned was that there is suffering in life. The cause of the suffering is our refusal to accept (befriend) impermanence. This refusal manifests itself in grasping (trying to keep hold of everything we like) and aversion (trying to get rid of everything we don’t like), which is said fool’s errand, given that everything is impermanent.
However, there is a way to end the suffering. Become friendly with impermanence, embrace it, get to know it at its core. Notice the monumental degree to which you are not in control of what comes when it comes, and what goes when it goes.
And in so doing, you relax. I’m talking unwind. Rest. Decompress, de-stress, sit back, slow down, take it easy, breathe. Be calm. Lighten up. Make yourself at home. Regain your original state of being, and rest in it.
And from that place of awareness, explore what nurtures that state for you. Notice the myriad little things that are littered throughout your days and weeks. And celebrate them. The faces of your loved ones. The light in their eyes. The way trees, with dark green leaves, on a sunny windy day look as though someone has splattered them with silver spray paint. Look up and see that on some nights Venus hangs directly beneath the Moon as if she’s a piece of jewellery, the one adorning the other.
Give thanks for the cherry picker, and the cherries themselves. Do more of that, and less grasping and aversion.
And if, like me, you feel like a bit of Swedish Death Cleaning, you can also learn to live as simply as possible, so that there is less and less to hold on to, and impermanence becomes your dance partner, and life a tango to the end.
This comes from my brave heart to yours...
With love,
Trisha Lord
Comments