Morning sit this afternoon.

"Are you afraid?"

"Actually, I was just wondering that. And I guess I think I am."

"Of what?"

"Well, I'm not sure really, life I guess. Of life. But that sounds vague and annoying and doesn't seem completely true."

"Can you clarify?"

"Hm, I was thinking about the future, I guess. These anxieties always start with thinking about the future. And I started to think that everyone I know will die, including me. And I had this feeling, like I was missing something. Like there's a purpose or a sense of participation to life that I'm worried I'm missing. Like everyone else has this feeling but me. And there's no way I'd ever really be able to know that I'm not missing it."

"Like those dreams you sometimes have where all of a sudden it's the middle of the school year and you have completely forgotten to attend a class and midterms are coming up and you know you'll fail it."

"Exactly. Exactly. I guess I'm just afraid of waking up some morning at age 62 and slapping myself in the head for not getting it. For not understanding life's purpose for the entire duration. Afraid that the realization will come too late."

"The frustration of not being able to make the magic-eye turn 3D."

"Goddamn, yes. But it's all bullshit though. God, this is what's most frustrating. I can understand, intellectually, that life is just crazy abstract. That you can't think about it as a whole movement, as something with rational stages. It's just a bunch of fragments and moments and thoughts and boredom, whatever. It's the breaths that slip in and out of the body, unnoticed. But I can't let the anxiety go. I can't take that understanding and pull it down to the body and understand it unequivocally. I still feel like everyone but me was born with a 'Life for Dummies' manual."

"You worry too much, you know? If you ask me, you've done okay these past 26 years."

"Yeah, you're probably right. I am the product of an entitled culture. We're probably all plugged into computers somewhere and this is just some silly artifical reality that doesn't mean anything anyway."

"Here we go...."


...........................................

All this and I was supposed to be meditating. Shut the mind up.