The First Thing We Think and the Last Thing We Say:

I’ve written various times about my love/hate relationship with technology, the Internet and how fast we either connect or disconnect with one another and ourselves. One day, while watching the news and hearing of another immense tragedy of people being bombarded by nature and buried under the rubble we build around us, I was hit by the wonder of worry. I immediately worried for them and wondered for myself: there by the Grace of God go I.

My next thought surprised me. With all our current technology and our ability to instantaneously communicate….could or would any of those under the rubble send out their last living words…their last dying words by Tweeting us? IM-ing us? Facebooking us? We have examples of these last minute words from 9/11 and Columbine via cell phones, but now we can conect with one another world-wide and word-wide in the instant of a moment – even if it is our last. It stopped me in my tracks and made me wonder at how powerfully we can unite in tragedy or joy – instantly, intimately and universally.

It made me wonder what the first and last thing will be that comes to our minds and out of our mouths when we reach that very last moment. I think about the spiritual practices to “pray without ceasing”, to “think only of the Divine in every moment”, so that in our last moment the Divine will present itself as we pass. They say Gandhi’s last word was “Ram” – one of the many names of God. They also say that for the greater majority of us our last word is “Shit!” I wonder what mine will be and hope it might happily be somewhere in between!

Today I read the following in Ode magazine:

“In the Zen Buddhist tradition, teachers save their pithy instructions for their last breath in this life. As they are dying, with their final exhalations, they utter the culmination of their understanding. One teacher’s last example was to say “thank you very much, I have no complaints”.

Buddha said “Transient are all conditioned things. Strive on with diligence”.

"However painful this moment is, it will pass. We don’t run the world, but what each of us does -- makes a difference. After a while, even if things are not better, we get over the shock".

These teachings and examples all seem so wonderful and ease-filled. But I still wonder as I wander through life and death experiences, if these concepts will bring me to that just-right-place in my next moment of crisis? This past year, I've been amazed at the litany of life tragedies all around me. I had dinner last night with a friend who is in the middle of chemo treatments for ovarian cancer. My brother just called to say he has a cardiac tumor. My father-in-law discovered he has Parkinson’s and is literally falling down all around me. My sister deals with colon cancer. My Aunt is going blind. My partner, myself and my friends have all lost our jobs and a gamut of things that once felt like ......security. Lately, I’ve noticed a difference in my blood pressure numbers and can only think “ah jeez….what’s next?”

I wonder, if I found out I had cancer, how would i react? Would I be as brave as those I witness --- or would I fall off the deep end? How often I’ve contemplated with fear “what could happen if this --- if that”? Then I read things in books and magazines about a wisdom that comes at that just-right-moment, helping us enter that just-right-place.

Those books say things like:
“If not for this, then that” – Everything is contingent on other things. I was not killed by the falling branch because it happened while I was at the store and not in the two seconds that I was underneath it. My friend lost all her funds because the Exchange and Securities oversight was flawed and because we live in a culture in which we use money to make more money. Everything is contingent -- removes blame from everyone. It is not any one person’s fault. It just is what it is."

Reading these things helped me remember the experience of seeing how my fear and worry of “what if”…fell to the way side one day when I found someone passed out on the bathroom floor at work. I remember how everything slowed down, was calm, silent and easy. I had entered the world of knowing in the midst of unknowing and it was -- peaceful. Who knew emergency could actually be peaceful? I know I didn't – hence my daily passages of time spent in worry.

I learned that in the middle of crisis, we are brought to an edge; a place “in between” each moment, that carries a power that can be found no where else - but that moment! Crisis can bring clarity that allows us to see what is immerging in the moment of “emergency”. (Emergent / See?). Something rises up in us. Something that is always there – waiting for us to notice it and invoke it. When we need that part of us that is at the Center of all that sleeps in us, and when it is given the chance --- it awakens in each of us. It presents us with rest, guidance and wisdom.

I can only hope that when I see or hear any next crisis, be it mine or others, that the first thing I think and the last thing I say will be blessed by this emergent and waking wisdom.