Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

I’m busily surfing and doing a few things here at the library where Jody works her second job. She works harder than anyone I know, with one full-time job, one part-time job, and enough projects to choke a horse. She’s already talking about getting her PhD now that she’s done with graduate school. Even though I do my freelance work in the evenings several nights a week, I still feel like a slacker. The woman is driven.

It’s nice to be able to look over at her reading and helping patrons while I mess around online, adding blogs to my feedlist, so I can view them from any computer instead of trying to store my opml files to the USB drive like I have been doing. She had to be at work at 9am, so I had a nice walk around until the library opened at ten. I went down some unfamiliar neighborhood until I found a McDonald’s swarmed with soccer kids and their parents. I got an egg McMuffin and some coffee then I walked back along this dry, grassy park (Rawhide Park, as a matter of fact) while I sipped my coffee.

There is a passage in the Hagakure “In the Shadow of the Leaves” that a samurai should meditate on death daily:

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, muskets, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

When I think about death I know that everything that exists is fleeting and temporary, like a mist, not just myself, but every aspect of the universe. All the works of man, all the bones of our ancestors, all the knowledge we have produced and compiled, but we still desire perpetuation and timelessness. Defeat of death is the defeat of time itself.

We move through time as if stepping from one crumbling stone to another. In a very real sense, all you have is the flow of each moment, although this is itself a form of timelessness. My memories of life live on in some fashion. That much is undeniable.