There is a natural state, a kind of awareness
that everyone experiences. This state, for good reason, is rarely described. I
suppose the experience, though very common, is hard to capture with words. I
know I feel daunted. The vulnerability that attends existence isn’t felt and
experienced the same by everyone. Words cannot convey fully what
happens, or what it is like. In fact, there seems to be a deep ambivalence that
attends the experience of existential vulnerability, and makes it hard to
grasp.
Regardless, of the natural limitations that
make this part of being human so impossible to convey, I’m going to try to penetrate
that ambivalence enough to refer to this facet of being alive. I know I cannot
do more. For, although I think our shared existential vulnerability unites us,
I am aware that what we commonly experience does not easily translate into
words. The condition that animates us into existence, and attends to us
throughout life, often evades us, precisely because of its power in our lives.
There is a natural reticence that comes with a deep realization of how
fragilely we are created. There is a state of paradoxical nakedness that
accompanies each of us, no matter how well dressed our station in life. The
fact we are alive is so precious and so evanescent!
The vulnerability of existence, the knowledge
that each of us is here, and that we did nothing to make it so, somehow sheers
from us bravado, and reduces each of us into a quivering mass of meat. This
experience underlies everything. Whether a banker, professor, miner, or street
person with delusional thoughts, each can be reduced to that same steaming heap
of dust. There is humility and a implacable justice that attends this leveling
off. All are really nothing, and oddly and inexplicably something. This is the
raw state we share.
Recently, I heard someone with a heart
pacemaker describe waking up in the middle of the night, with irregular
heartbeats, and wondering if this is the moment, the way she was going to die.
I have reason to suspect that most of those reading these words have had their
own moments like this. Everyone knows our time could end at any moment and few
of us live like that. I am writing about this, not because I think we should be
trying to live out each moment with this awareness. I do.
What motivates my writing today is something
quite different, I want to underscore the perpetual fragility of all of our
lives. This aspect of what we all share, brings out the compassion in me, and
most importantly, arouses awareness in me. I share the same
mysterious origin as others. I am related to them by virtue of the common
mystery of our existence.
I find this fact of life compelling.
Underneath all of the differences I seem to have with everyone there is this
one commonality. We came from the same place. And we all are going back there.
No matter who we are, or how well we think we’ve lived and loved, or honored
any belief system, the truth seems to be, that we return from where we never
really left. All of us, are bounded, perpetually, by the unknown.
Existence is so precarious, uncontrollable,
and liberating, that it is a solace to me. It seems that there is a built-in
sense of community in our shared sense of vulnerability. I can’t think of
anything: ideology, religion, gender identification (or not), money, social
prestige, intelligence, or particular insight, which overrides this fragility.
Human life is hard because this is a condition of our existence. It is also a
commonality, which if we could honestly show it to each other, would bind us.
One of the deepest levels of our shared humanity, is a liability, a
susceptibility to Life, that has a way of bringing us together, despite the
stubbornness of our adherence to being unique individuals. There is a
paradoxical indifference here that takes us all in, and that teaches us how to
do the same.
All we have to do is roll over in each
other’s presence and show our bellies. By becoming as vulnerable as we are, and
sharing this experience with others (human and non-human), community is exposed
— the invisible connection (thought lost by so many) becomes evident again.
I’ll show you mine, because I know my act of
disclosure will enhance the likelihood of you showing me yours. Let’s go
through that doorway, as deeply revealing as it is.
