THE MEANING OF LIFF

I get a letter asking me to advise on life's purpose.

Here's my reply.

You’re asking ME the purpose of life???????

 

You’re having a laugh.

 

I’m just a fellow traveller as baffled as anyone. All I have learned is that happiness is inside one’s own noodle. But as to putting it into practice. That’s a whole different ball game. I wish it were different, but I reckon I’m as prey to circumstance as anyone I know.

 

If you want a view, I see happiness as nirvana. Nir va na. Never blown off. That’s what the three words mean (as I understand it).  It makes sense to me. A state of mind, entirely capable of joyous appreciation of what is, even when what is seems to consist of what is negative. The infallible, immovable ability to take delight in what there is to delight in, rather than concentrate on what apparently preoccupies as harm, hurt, pain, dislike or other negatives.

 

Easy to say.

 

Very, very hard to do.

 

If I have a life quest, having moved my mind from depressive to merely aberrant but without the depression (itself a proud boast), achieving that unshakeable equilibrium is it. And this is where zen and its paradoxes come in. Seeking it can’t get it. Trying at it defeats it. Attaining it is by letting it be. “It” doesn’t exist anyway. Preferring it self defeats. Puzzled? Me too, brother.

 

I keep living, finding kindness a help to me more than others, finding silence a comfort, finding that the more I think to define myself the harder it is, and finding the state of happy being as bloody elusive as ever.

 

And then....................

 

In the field of grass a single flower.

 

The copper beech everyone said would not grow, grows.

 

Shit stinks gloriously.

 

A pigeon emphasizes ridiculously its third syllable of five, over and over.

 

Swallows consort about the season on a wire. Time to stay? Time to go?

 

I see mice, a rarity, but a symbol of the season.

 

The beech hedge smells of nothing but beech.

 

This wine tastes great.

 

My legs carry me - a miracle.

 

I am joyful. I am sad. I am angry. I am tired. I sleep. I wake. I sleep again. I wake. Miraculous, when you think about it.

 

My thoughts come. My thoughts go. Some stay. Some go quick. Trains of thought in an endlessly open station.

 

But just look at how much better off I am than the man screaming in the agony of dying. Ta, life.

 

And for the man screaming in agony before death - not yet dead.

 

Life. It just bloody goes on all around no matter what silly fuckers like you, or me do. What we really ever control is zilch.

 

In short, I’m as puzzled about life's meaning as you.