The Place That Has No Name

Or, Attending to the Suchness of Things

I’m thinking out loud here, so bear with me. I’m always hesitant to lean too heavily into words as therapy because it can come off sounding self-absorbed, but well, after the past week, here we are.

Four friends of the family died in the last week. Four. I found out about two of them within ten minutes of each other. They all existed in that fuzzy place, not intimate friends, but much more than just acquaintances - the sort of folks we’d keep in touch with and see a few times a year. But seeing them was always a pleasure, an event, an opportunity to catch up. Bit players that brought love and joy into our lives. The stage crew. The ones we knew were always there in the wings.

But there isn’t, ever, an always is there?

There’s a lot to unpack here, I know. Gratefulness. The idea that everyone has meaning. That even a small gesture of kindness can change someone else’s life. That we often aren’t even aware of what we mean to someone else.

That the world we have in front of us can be - mostly is - enough.

That last one is where I want to land today, because I happened to watch a lecture the other day by the pop philosopher Jason Silva about stopping the horizontal flow of time in our lives and arriving at that “place that has no name”

The place of arrival. The place where wanting ceases and we can act only for the pleasure of the act itself.

I mention these two things - losing a series of friends and attempting to discover what Timothy Leary called the “place of absolute absolution” - because it feels like the latter is one way to deal with the former.

To be sure, my meanderings here amount to a hill of beans compared to the very real grief that the direct families of these lost friends are having to currently navigate. And it occurred to me, how curious is life now that my celebrations of new birth are - more or less - behind me and I’m entering a phase of celebrating the lives that were as opposed to will be.

But maybe that makes all these questions of identity and achievement even more practical to consider. When are we done? When have we arrived? When have we attained the declarative version of ourselves? Is that possible, or even desirable?

What the heck IS happiness anyway?

I don’t know. I do know WHEN I’m happy, however, and those standards have wildly changed from when I was a child, to a young man, to today. Perhaps they’ll change again.

Happiness is most certainly not losing friends, but losing friends is part of life.

Such is life.

Attend to the suchness.

Two of our community here were among those that passed, but we abide because we are imperfect and so is everything else and everyone. If I could just BE every once in a while, just content with the dishes and the dinner and the shoveling of snow and the voices of my daughter and wife, then that would make all the difference.

But being in the moment requires being in pain sometimes, or confused, or irritated. Or angry. Attending to how life is rather than how we want it to be is so much harder than it sounds. But I’ll keep trying. We’ll try together, ok? Let’s walk.