“We live in a flash of light; evening comes and it is night forever. It’s only a flash and we waste it. We waste it with our anxiety, our worries, our concerns, our burdens.”
— Anthony de Mello
By any available standard, our lives are incredibly short. We live for such a short time, yet almost all our time is spent in mindless distraction, or worse, persistent anxiety.
We suffer because we were brought up to look at the world through the wrong lens. Instead of enjoying the beauty of nature or delighting in the smallest joys of life—music, food, laugher—we obsess over status, approval and hierarchy. We’d rather be better off than our neighbour than to be actually better off. Studies have shown this.
It’s only when we de-program ourselves from this sickening condition that we can wake up to reality as it stands before us. Not our projections of what it should be, but awareness of how it is. Our suffering arises when our views of the world are in conflict with reality.
To truly enjoy this life, we need to recognize our impermanence. We need to acknowledge our death, remembering it each day that we rise again. Doing this is the gateway to freedom. Doing this is the beginning of life. When we see our life on the long horizon of time, our worries begin to fall away. When we visit a cemetery, we’re brought back to what really matters in life and we forget the meaningless distractions that we medicate our existential angst with.
When we see there isn’t anywhere to go and we cease our efforts of propulsion, we arrive. After all, we’re just fireflies flickering in the night; we might as well enjoy the light.