Fruit of Samsara

Often insecurity regarding something external to us is just disguised insecurity with regards to something within us. Insecurity regarding whether we are able to survive through and thrive over some change that may be upon us, or change we imagine may be upon us, or situations wish to avoid, and so on.

I have not been taking the best care of myself, so it's only natural for me to carry that into other relationships - whether it's being snappy, needy or withdrawn, disconnected or overly sensitive.

I have been thinking that I ought to reassess what I want to do with my life for the nth time and I haven't followed through. I eat food which comforts me but does not nourish me more often than I'd like. I have been sleeping too little.

I have studied out of a sense of duty rather than passion. Or perhaps with the intention of making up for self-perceived deficiencies. Some deficiencies I attribute to myself, some are those I imagine others are attributing to me. I'm desperately shovelling dirt into a bottomless pit instead of nurturing a plant that already has all it needs to grow and has, from the moment it burst out its seed, been beautiful.

Is it any wonder that I do not feel at my best? Despite having been in this situation many times before, I find myself here again. Slowly this cycle has become apparent: enthusiasm, stability, routine, drudgery, disconnection, desperation, contemplation, rediscovery, enthusiasm,...

Whether this cycle is a symptom of my humanity, my culture (societal or familial), or the singular path my own life has taken, I do not know. Nor do I know whether it is desirable, or even possible, to escape this Samsaric cycle. This cycle, as littered with experiences of intense suffering as it may be, is graced by moments of intellectual, aesthetic, familial and romantic beauty.

These moments are the fruits of the tree. This tree, hulking and unwieldy as it is with twisted branch and knotted trunk, suffers the pains of growth silently to grow the sweet, physically diminutive fruit. The days spent enjoying these fruits are dwarfed by those spent toiling to grow them. And yet, would we do away with the whole business altogether for an empty Nirvana defined by what it lacks rather than what it has?

Ultimately that is the real choice I face: experience in its totality or non-experience, to die before death. To accept both joy and pain, or neither. To accept the gift of coin that life has made me I must pocket both sides, or refuse both.

Again I find myself drift away into abstraction and quasi-ethereal, dulling meaning with sesquipedalian verbosity and in the process (perhaps not incidentally) distracting me from the task at hand. I am like a farmer who, upon seeing his friend come to visit, decides to discuss and philosophise the best way to till the field, all the while glancing sideways at the field that remains untilled.

It is best to get back to the business at hand, before the sweat on my brow, born of labour, be supplanted by the cold sweat of dread.