When Anthony Was

The Answer at Hand and Foot

"Without the end of your life in mind, you came in quite naturally."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

BY ANTHONY ROSS

How do we live?  What is a life?  Such simple questions are the mirrors to an infinite number of complexities and variations.  Is it possible to say everything about this in a blog post?  Am I pompous enough to know the answer, while I'm alive and in living life, let alone to write it in less than ten paragraphs?  The answer is yes, because the answer is forthcoming.

The answer is already at hand!  Nobody can answer that, and so we've got it.  There is no discussion needed, though there always seems to be discussion from angst and conceptualization of what it is about and how we can make it better, or how it is worse. Imagine a baby, being born.  However many months later, it's walking on two feet.  The parents say, "Well done child.  You execute your walking with promise.  Keep practicing, and one day you can get paid for walking so well.  Then, when you are making money at your walking, your life will be well.  Yet, you can always make more.  Just keep at it, and you'll really get somewhere.  Walk more and you'll get there faster."

This is agreeably ridiculous.  Yet, how often our questions arise of, "What am I doing with my life?  Am I doing the right things?  Am I heading in the right direction?"  You were born without direction.  Without the end of your life in mind, you came in quite naturally.  Then the thoughts come in to try to get to the top of life before the end comes.  It's a linear thought process that was adopted with the influence of all those other directions, pushing and pulling. It's not about going from stage to stage to stage in a linear manner, but a sparkling dance of jazz music jamming with itself, as Alan Watts might put it.

A baby awakens into a flux and flow of life.  They come to understanding the variations and complexities around them, but over time grind these subtle nuances of perception into a very obtuse and narrow mindset of what direction they are taking things and what direction they think they should take them, usually based on what others conclude about their life.  Their digging and clear responding of what is is effectively wiped out and only comes back in the certain moments of clarity that anyone gets, no matter how confused, with good fortune.  These moments are the ones that we should be after, but they are also the moments that are the subtlest, and thus the understanding of how to 'reach,' or better said, 'read' them is unfamiliar, though not unattainable through the right viewing.

The right viewing really is the best moment itself, never mind the circumstances.  All circumstances are responded to the way that they 'should' be, when they are seen correctly.  What is seeing correctly?  It is seeing without the fragmented self.  Seeing without the ideas of, 'many months later, this will be helpful to me,' or, 'because I'm doing this, my problem will be solved.' Wanting to fix 'this thing' doesn't fix it.  Both of those are ideas that bring us away from the answer at hand.  Life is, and any complexity that it has is only a sparkling piece of the on going music.  Any conclusions we have on it are from the past and usually based in a mirror that is throwing a lot of unnecessary complexities into the present, because our viewing is skewed.

What is the question?  The question is 'What is the question?'  Is it so hard to act with what the seeing is, to have perception match response? What would we do if everyone treated their life with attention and care?  The next step would be to do what is needed to be done, without an idea of it.  What is that?  Don't ask.  Attend.  Yet, nobody needs to say it.  It has to be, and such an answer will be.  In attention, there may still be the questions of difficult verbal response, such as, "What is a living?"  This question's answer might not even be there, in words, but it will be perceived.  The following is a poem re-discovered in my notes that relates to this.

I keep thinking, "What's in the words?"

And so I never look, but I can see.

Looking is a notion in itself.

I can see.

There is nothing blocking it.

All is as it is.

This is the experience that is required to be in this moment.  This is the perfect experience to experience in the way I am experiencing it.  The experiencing of it is expanding into many more experiences and explanations within it.  The only rule for this function is seeing.

A baby doesn't need an explanation for it.  They're sitting with it; the stuff of it.  Such is the intention I see behind Rilke's words:

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.  Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will                           gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."