A Day at a Time – Zoom Cocktails – 29/3/20

https://yestolife.org.uk/day-at-a-time-a-daily-blog-of-life-in-lockdown/

I woke up this morning feeling tired and my mood a bit low which quite likely has something to do with Zoom cocktails and the fact that I moved onto a couple of House parties after that! Then the realisation that I had lost an hour not gained it with the clock change. I had little time to acclimatise before heading onto another Zoom connection for the day! This was for a group called Death, Dreams and Forgetfulness which normally meets once a month in London. It is a contemplative group which follows on from one I did last year called A Year to Live. Both groups are about contemplating impermanence, the transient nature of all that exists. Covid-19 is now doing this job for all of us, as everything we held as a constant is changing. I am sure some of you reading this will be familiar with or have heard about Stephen Levine’s book A Year to Live. As the name suggests it is living a year as though it is your last, which seems extraordinarily prescient now. To feel the pain of impermanence and loss is a profound reminder of what it means to exist, the value of life, and as said in a previous post, calls us to seize the moment. A cancer diagnosis can have the same effect.

This quote beautifully describes it: –

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky 1949