The Evanescent Essence of the Universe
Today is the third Friday of the month that I'm on leave. Happy to have cleared 3 days of leave and I still of twenty over days to go. And that is a good problem to have.
Knowing how and when to slow down is important in maintaining your health and well-being. The human body is a complex system that can easily be knocked off-balance if one is not vigilant. Meditation is a way of self-monitoring one's being and presence. Cultivating a sense of self-awareness which includes meta-cognition and mindfulness is the key to a healthy mind and body.
I have my excesses. I think I am still not getting sufficient sleep every day. But I am aware of this and am readjusting my lifestyle whenever I can to maintain a better balance. Not being aware of one's own weaknesses is the greatest flaw a person could have. We must be cognisant of our own shortcomings or one day they will surprise you and cause you difficulties, which could have been avoided had you dealt with them earlier.
Life is a dissipative structure. We are maintaining stability by ingesting food and air to keep our physical and mental structures intact. This stability can be disturbed by changes in the environment or through self-inflicted harm, like addiction. In any case, over time, all structures breakdown and a new stable pattern takes over. We temporarily maintain this ego structure which we call Self, carving out a chunk of space and time as a vehicle for exploring the universe or energy and matter.
What information and wisdom can we carry over to our next iteration? Or perhaps this is the last iteration, of which we are finally assimilating all the knowledge and experience that we've gathered over eons? We shall not think too far ahead. We must value this temporal structure which we call our mind and body; this divine instrument from which we experience the world, distilling its hidden wisdom.
Such is the beauty and mystery of life. The answers we seek are at the back of the book, but we only get to read them when we've experienced all the tension and drama of our life's story-arc. Will death itself finally reveal all answers or perhaps enlightenment within one's lifetime is the conscious death that we seek?
To live the examined life is to embrace all the vicissitudes of life and learning every nuance of knowledge which pain and pleasure reveal to us. Like the incessantly diligent ants I see in my kitchen that are constantly probing for food, we as humans must also be equally persistent in our quest of understanding.
This quest is the noblest endeavour of them all. It makes an adventure out of life and infuses every experience of ours with epiphany and significance. Let's celebrate this life of ours, this ephemeral dalliance with the world and embrace the evanescent essence of the universe.
