Impermanence

Impermanence by James R. Eads

9/1/18

I lost my center this past week. Circumstances arose that left me feeling needy and more alone. I’ve had plenty of people around, so it’s not that. But I can feel the neediness pulsing in my blood and running its greedy hands over my skin, and it’s taken days of meditation and thought to find my center again today.

Of course, there were several days in which I didn’t realize the loss of my center – days of confusion and excitement and fantasy that things are really just fine, that I am just fine. I’m still not sure what pulled me away from myself though I suspect that finally burying Michael’s ashes is a big part of it.

On the day of the full moon, I buried his ashes in our garden. I also put some of his “little treasures” into the hole with him, and all of it was watered by my copious tears and my gratitude, deep and true. Since then, I actually feel myself letting go a bit more. I feel the beauty of freedom, and I know that this freedom is the gift of accepting a greater intensity of impermanence. But this feeling of freedom, this acceptance of impermanence, also seems to be so new that my ground has once again been shaken. For now, there’s no kidding myself in any way, Michael is really gone.

No one is as close as Michael was, and maybe no one ever will be that close again. I don’t know. But I do know that I’m very aware of giving others space. I think I’ve been good at giving space for a long time. But before, I always had Michael to come home to, Michael to talk to, Michael to work it through with. This brought me comfort and peace and I didn’t need connections to others the way I currently do. So, and this seems so obvious, one of the main understandings is that my friends aren’t going to replace the level of intimacy that I have lost. And though it seems obvious, living it is something else again.

What I’ve realized with friends, is the utter importance of not being sticky. Love feels sticky to me when there’s a glue-like pull to it. It’s a love that’s not free, a love that needs something, a love that wants too much.

Certainly, I have levels of intimacy with others. But of course, none of these relationships can fill in for one that was 35 years long. It’s just not possible. And more to the point, I just can’t expect it to be.

I’ve asked my closest friends whether they have felt me being sticky. They all say they have not, but maybe they would say that anyway, though actually I believe they are the kinds of people who tell the truth when asked. Mostly people keep telling me how “strong” I’m being, but I’ve got to say, it doesn’t always feel this way.

For instance, I certainly experience this stickiness inside of me. There are times when I go through layers of emotional garbage to get to a more spacious place, and I always do it alone. I don’t put it on others, don’t talk about it, and I don’t expect others to fill up my emptiness. But oh, sometimes, how I wish they could!

I’ve noticed that if I’m set to have lunch or dinner with a friend, and they have to cancel for some reason, I’m certainly disappointed. The disappointment can then turn into feelings of anger, or loneliness, or a sense of rejection, along with several iterations of why things got canceled and whether there is some kind of problem in our relationship. It’s exhausting when it happens and thankfully, it only happens occasionally, but it can go on for quite some time. These are the times when my center feels gone.

Eventually, meditation allows me to move to the stronger place – the place in which I know that I love, and am loved in return. It seems so easy to write these words, and yet the years of work on the self that have gone into these words, have been long and arduous indeed. And now all of that work is being tested in the biggest way possible.

All of this has made me realize that there’s something new in me now that wasn’t there before, and it’s something about impermanence, about holding things lightly, about becoming comfortable with being truly alone.

What I know for sure is that watching one’s mate die over a long period of time has made me extraordinarily aware of the actual experience of impermanence. For as one slowly dies, one thing after another changes and is lost, and one thing after another must be surrendered. As Michael used to say, it’s the death of a thousand cuts. Before, impermanence was an interesting concept, part of understanding the way things work, part of spiritual philosophy, but now it’s a living reality.

Something that I unrealistically thought would last forever, didn’t. And yes, of course on some level, the relationship with Michael is continuing and is alive in me. But in this human realm, it’s over. And one of the main lessons that his death affords me, is to truly grasp that nothing lasts. Nothing.

It’s horrendous, really. We just can’t take it in because it is such a huge and painful lesson. Nothing, not a single thing that I own or do or am, lasts in this physical world. I’m currently struggling with this on a daily basis. But it’s an excellent struggle! It requires me to go to my Higher Self for renewal and sanity. It requires me to look at all of my possessions from a different perspective. It asks me to let go of the previous moment, and to embrace this one. If I don’t want to act crazy, or be too needy, or lose my stability, I must go to my center and ground, over and over again, many times a day.

So, finding the stable place, the strong place, is all up to me. There’s no one to bounce it off of the way I bounced it with Michael. I know this is good for me. I know it’s supporting my real growth, but it’s hard and I have to be very alert to the missteps that are caused by need. And somehow, it’s all connected to love, and learning to love from a clearer place inside of me.

Part of what is proceeding from this greater understanding of impermanence is that, as far as I can tell, I haven’t made any important decisions out of fear! When I really know that nothing lasts, it allows me to let go more easily. For example, I was sorely tempted to buy a new house a few months ago. It was a fine house in the perfect part of town. What a great distraction it would have been! More importantly, it would have been an avoidance of the very real need to process my grief, and there have been so many times when I have wished to avoid this endless processing. But impermanence says there will be other houses, or there won’t, and it doesn’t really matter.

I know that this work with impermanence and aloneness, like all work with the self, is an ongoing practice that requires me to be vigilant, and honest, and most meaningfully, compassionate with myself. And this compassion is really just another way of saying that I’m learning a deeper level of self-love.

This is not a sticky love, but a love built on the truth that everything changes. It’s a love built on the ability to surrender. It’s an acceptance of the reality of constant change at the deepest level. Grasping the truth of impermanence means that much of what I think and feel is so important, is simply ego. And when I genuinely know this, I am forced to find that which is permanent. For there is one thing that lasts, and only one.

I told a friend recently that when I go into deep meditation, my current mantra is a surrender to love. “I am Love, being Loved, by Love.” Try it for yourself, if you’d like. For me, it’s a paradoxical sense of receiving infinite love into my heart, and simultaneously giving infinite love out from my heart. It’s a constant flowing motion that contains utter stillness at its center. For always, the lessons eternally come back to the principles we’ve been shown, to those things we know in our bones. Always, they come back to the One True Thing.