Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

"...I am prone to periods of deep melancholy, and yesterday was one of those days.

Near sunset, I went outside to replenish bird feeders and look at the sky. The sounds of the day were dimming down, and I felt that familiar homesick feeling — the Welsh call it hiraeath — that sends an inexpressible longing for something unnamed through my spirit. It’s an odd thing, really…a sense of the awareness of suffering in this life, the absolute inevitability of suffering…and a gradual, almost pleasurable increase in the certainty of suffering.

With age comes a curious degree of resolute reality, and when that reality accrues in the rafters of one’s mind — as it is accruing in mine — a thoughtful man realizes that he has expended a staggering amount of his life dreading and trying to avoid suffering.

And all for nothing. All that effort, all that planning and dodging and strategizing, and then one day he stands in the damp grass of his back yard while his dogs writhe in joy on their backs and he realizes that he is as exposed to pain as he is to the suspended ceiling of sky.

And at such moments, all he can really do is watch the world around him, with all its actions and inhabitants..."

Read the whole thing... a lovely, lyrical meditation by blogger SK Orr at Steeple Tea.