If you only had 3 minutes to live, what would you want to know?
It was this I wondered on Friday morning, when I went for a slow walk on my usual beach. Having just come out of a 5 night silent meditation retreat, my mind was still and quiet. My body was sluggish and mellow, my rounded belly holding the whole basket of fries I’d just consumed.
I had many emotions as I strolled along. Since Bobo died, my beach walks have been both beautiful and difficult. His absence fills my heart with that curious sensation of longing and love. That’s what I call it now when my grief comes:
LOVE.
(It’s a reframing I’m growing increasingly fond of).
As I walked, thoughts blew in and out. Most of them were habitual nonsense and I asked my mind if it could be fully present, please. It abided my request, witnessing each placing of my feet against the cool grainy sand, taking in the ebb and flow of sound from the churning waves, and drinking in the contrasts of colour from cliff face, forest, sky, and sea.
I walked to the very end of the beach. Past a large outcropping of rock, to one of the special places Bobo and I had loved to go. I sneaked around the rocks while the waves receded and smiled at the little cove. I made my way to where there used to be a waterfall. It had slowly diminished to a trickle, and then stopped, over the last two seasons of low rain. It’s surface was still slippery, in memory of what it once had been. I placed my hand against the wet rock, as I’d done on my first visit here.
Only this time I wasn’t welcoming myself to this place; this time I was letting it go.
During our retreat last week, the teacher had said that she contemplates death each day that she wakes. She asks herself, “If this was my last day, how would I want to be?” Knowing that I only had three weeks left to walk this beach, I found myself looking around truly understanding what a practice like that is for.
What’s that song?
“Don’t it always seem to go,
That you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone…”
I looked around and thought about all the times I had forgotten to love this place. Been too grumping to be grateful, too busy to cherish. I thought about how beautiful it is to contemplate something’s end. And to be brought then to that place of deep knowing, that all we ever truly want is to be 100% in love with what or who is happing around us.
I’m not saying that I could harness this level of love or presence every day. It seems life gets too practical for such incessant swooning. But to check in every once in a while, to look around and contemplate how you would see a place, or a person, or your own life if there were only a couple of weeks left in it.
Or a couple of days, a couple of hours, a couple of minutes…
I did an exercise with Tara Brach once, and I’ll share it with you now, so you can do it too. She asked us to close our eyes (go on, you can close yours too), and ask yourself: If you only had a few minutes left of this life, if you knew it would all be over in just a minute to two, what would you most want to know?
She asked us to really get into it, to create this scenario in our mind. (Go on, really do it).
I dreamt it up, made it real, let myself really feel that it was the end. Then, I was filled with a miraculously inexplainable sense of love: it was almost shocking in its intensity, in it’s only-ness.
I simply wanted to know that I had deeply loved. It wasn’t that I wanted to know I’d been loved: but that I had felt love, that I had loved well. Not just specific people, either (though that was there too), but that I had loved every thing, every moment.
Tara went on to ask the rest of the room what they had wanted to know or feel. Some described wanting to know that they had belonged, that they had been present, or like me, that they had loved.
Loving. Belonging. Presence.
Being fully here (even if you don’t know why).
In the end, is this all that really matters?
In today’s busy world it’s a big deal that you’ve read all the way to the end of this blog… and I thank you so much that. But the value in this contemplation is to truly have a go at it yourself.
So if you haven’t already, close your eyes, turn inward, and ask… if this was really it, your whole life about to be over…
…what is it about this life that you really want to know?
And when you get your answer, when you can really feel it, there’s only one thing left to do…
To try (the very best you can) to live it.
