Blocks of Thought

I know I shouldn't be afraid of the things I'm afraid of, but I can't overcome my fears. I'm scared of talking to people, like at school, or even people on the phone. I'm scared of others judging me. I'm scared of being a financial failure. I'm scared of cancer and medical bills. I'm scared of having a terrible job the rest of my life. I'm scared of being angry all the time. I don't want to be angry. I don't want to have a temper that snaps so easily. I don't want to be jealous of what other people have. I want to be happy for other people. I want empathy. I want to be looked-up to. I want to be proud of myself. I want to stop caring what other people think of me, but without resorting to dismissing them as human beings. I want the world to get along; I want people to stop killing each other. I want people to open their minds and stop being ignorant of the world. I want peace and relaxation. I want respect and honesty. I want to act like I think. I want to think before I speak. I want to be charming and charismatic. I want to lead people to prosperity. I want to be a genius. I want people to study me five hundred years from now. I want to write breath-taking literature. I want to influence the hearts of people. I want them to think about why they live. I want everything to slow down because I'm too scared of everything happening at once.

I don't want a funeral. I want to be cremated. I want a party instead of a funeral. I want to see what the future will look like, but I can't. I want to overcome my fear of death, now, at age twenty, before it overpowers me any longer. I want to do the things I want to do before I die. But even if I did, would that actually remove my fear of death? I'd want more, and more, and more. There's no end to human desire, yet there is clearly an end to human life. The Buddha says all life is suffering because all we do is desire. Well, I desire not to die, but that won't make it so. So we should be more like the Buddha, and we should be more like Christ, and accept our fate: that one day we will die, and even though it may be preceded by a glorious life, the world will move on. As Robert Frost so famously said about life, "It goes on." As John Keats so beautifully and concisely expressed in his epitaph, "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."

And so Virginia Woolf committed suicide and so Earnest Hemingway committed suicide, and so many others have committed suicide, who's names we no longer remember, who's names we can never locate again; they are gone, and in time, will be forgotten. Everyone who has died, will die, has been born, or will be born, will be forgotten in eternity. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed: Hemingway and Woolf and all the Popes and all the kings and all the peasants are gone, but their atoms are not, and even though that doesn't mean we live forever, it demands the question: were we really ever here, wherever here is, to begin with?

We are no more infinite than a ham; we are no less infinite than a ham.

I came from brilliancy
And return to brilliancy.
What is this?
Kaa!

--The Last Poem of Hoshin, taken from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compliled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki