Sunday, July 17, 2005

Adversity

I saw the movie 'Marvin's Room' on CBS today. It was quite a good movie, especially since I had found myself recently contemplating adversity. Why do people have to have such struggles in life - from health issues to financial to emotional? This movie, staring Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep and Leo de Caprio among others, was perfect viewing at this time. I had heard 'adversity builds character', but I also realized it so deeply shapes the lives we lead. It forces us out of our complacency, out of our self-obsessed lives of indulgence, to look outside and within.

I recently spoke to an aunt I haven't spoken to in at least 15 years because of concerns with her health. I had thought of calling her before, but it was always, well frankly uncomfortable to do so after all these years. And yet, when hard times are on us, we leave our cushy lives and do things we think we are not ready for. And we always feel empowered when we leave our comfort zones, the freedom from entrapment!

The movie also made me contemplate growing old, growing dependent, death ... all these events we try to block out of our lives. So I'm forcing myself to contemplate these, even though I hope to have a half century or so left in me. Because I feel when we can accept death, we can accept life as it is.

I'd love to hear from my small pool of readers on their thoughts on such matters. Please use the comment form if you feel you have anything to say or share.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When you accept the inevitablity of death, you also accept the uncertainty of death; meaning death can occur at any moment. But when you say, "I hope to have a half century or so left in me", you don't accept the uncertainty of death ;-)

I think that once you accept death, several things happen. You start focusing on what's really important to your life (and how much time do we waste on what's really unimportant and trivial these days?), so you start to live in the moment. You make sure that you relationship with others is "complete". And you aren't fearful of things anymore -- recently analyzing myself, I found that most of my actions are based of fear. And I think that's true for most people.

Well, those are my thoughts; some from personal experience and others from reading Buddhist books (I can't recommend "The Tibeten Book of Living and Dying" highly enough -- I would send you my copy, but I already shipped it to someone in Norway about a year ago!! To a "mentor" of mine, who was...passing away.)

-Sriram, hoping he hasn't participated in the 1st ever digital study-circle