The Elusive Sense of Being Fully Alive

      “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.” Ernest Becker

     "if all of us would make an all-out effort to contemplate our own death, to deal with our anxieties surrounding the concept of death, and to help others familiarize themselves with these thoughts, perhaps there could be less destructiveness around us." Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

     “Facing one’s own death when still alive offers the best preparation for being able to live well the actual moment of death. The potential for such practice is that it enables one to live without the deadening effects of the fear of death. Only once death has become a natural part of life will it be possible to go beyond the influence of existential fear and thereby come fully alive to life as it unfolds in the present moment.”
       Analayo. "Mindfully Facing Disease & Death: Compassionate Advice from Early Buddhist Texts.” Wisdom, 2016. 

     See also: http://jglovas.wixsite.com/awarenessnow/single-post/2017/07/03/Solving-a-Tough-Paradox

                 And: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2017/05/743-existential-loneliness.html

Visitors by Robert Pope   http://robertpopefoundation.com/

What Are We Doing With Vital Energy?

     “He was an old man, wore old man’s clothes, a flannel shirt and old man’s trousers, slippers and a hat, and had an old man’s gait, yet there was nothing old man-ish about him, such as there was with my grandfather or my father’s uncle, Alf; on the contrary, when he suddenly opened up to us and wanted to show us things, it was in a kind of artless childlike way, infinitely friendly, but also infinitely vulnerable, the way a boy without friends might behave when someone showed some interest in him, one might imagine, unthinkable in the case of my grandfather or Alf, it must have been at least sixty years since they had opened up to anyone like that, if indeed they ever had. But no, Haugue hadn’t really opened himself to us, it was more as if it had been his natural self which his rejection had been protecting when we arrived. I saw something I didn’t want to see because the person showing us was unaware of how it looked. He was more than eighty years old, but nothing in him had died or calcified, which actually makes life far too painful to live, that’s what I think now. At the time it just made me feel uneasy.”
       Karl Ove Knausgaard. “A Death in the Family. My Struggle: Book 1.” Vintage Books, London, 2014.


     We bury so much difficult-to-understand, liminal energy in our bodies, causing us to harden, stiffen, & die well before we're buried. This feared & banished energy is the very stuff of life, growth, learning, evolution. What wasted opportunity!

 

Public Gardens, Halifax, NS, Canada

Fully Awake? Fully Alive?

     "In an odd way, though, there were times when I missed the adventure, even the danger, of the real war out in the boonies. It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. you become part of a tribe and you share the same blood ..."

     O'Brien T. "The things they carried." Mariner Books, Boston, 1990.

Greyser   www.dpreview.com