I’ve heard that enlightenment comes from a form of detachment – the ability to go through life experiencing relationships, meals, sleep, work, love, devotion, prayer – any activity – with the capacity to feel it, live it, and let it go. No attachments – not to meaning, not to particular feelings, not to suffering. No clinging to things which are inherently impermanent. Not even fighting that the true nature of all living experience is impermanence. Not looking back; not looking forward. Life is happening right now.
I don’t know any enlightened beings, and I’m likely not to. I don’t live in a communal meditative self-sustaining village, where, I’ve heard, even in the ones where members are ensconced in silence, there are still intense interpersonal conflicts. I don’t know if that’s true or just the kind of sour grapes that those who enlightenment eludes bring back down the metaphoric mountain to help ease their attachment to failure. Whatever the reason, I’m fully attached to all the things I’m not supposed to be attached to – I rile against impermanence, judge some feelings and experiences to be more important than others, spend eons of time looking forward (the better to worry with, my dear) and backward (the better to regret with, my dear).
I infrequently remember that I have breath in my body, an inner metronome for soothing, balance and centering that is far less irritating than the brown plastic metronome that sat atop the ancient, perpetually out-of-tune upright piano during my reluctant practice sessions, just me, sheet music for songs I wasn’t particularly interested in, and 88 keys that only rarely found their way under correct finger tips which were often cold because the piano was in our refinished but damp basement. To the beat of the incessant metronome, I languished, withering daily in the abyss of 30 interminably prolonged lifetime-minutes. I produced much suffering, very little music.
And just that quickly I slip back. I was right there in the moment, typing away about today, and I began to look back. Not look back, really, but travel back, arrive as if it’s a physical destination. I’m my own time traveler, living simultaneously in worlds separated by the flimsiest of barriers.
Now, aware of the duality, I must choose. Somewhere in my damp and leaky garage, in an old and dented cardboard box, in a yellowing photo book with peel-up clear sticky sheets, is a photograph of me standing at the Prime Meridian Line, one foot in two worlds, simultaneously inhabiting the eastern and western hemispheres.
Perhaps consciousness is like that. We straddle different zones of time, different land masses of our memory, some of the distant past, some not yet crossed, only rarely ending up in one and only one place.