Yesterday, I was caught in a flurry of emotions. There was anger, impatience, anxiety and fatigue. I searched for the core raison d’etre for these uncomfortable emotions and found fear. Fear of loss, fear of not understanding, fear of wasting time. Ultimately these are all fear of death. The acknowledgement of our mortality and the mortality of all things brings about an urgency for life. If nothing is forever, then why not plunge ourselves into every experience, person, and thing. Should we fill every waking moment by pushing ourselves to the brink of experience and understanding? Is this how we make the most out of life?
There is an Incan myth that mentions “before anything existed there was a void. Then an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent being manifested. There was no joy in knowing, seeing, and doing everything. So this being then dispersed itself to create the universe as we know it, so that it could experience itself. This story highlights a key idea of mine of how life is only meant to be experienced.
Still I push myself to the max to experience it all. I want to experience enlightenment, all different states of being. I want to experience health. I want to experience mastery. I want to experience success. Perhaps what plagues me is that I want to experience all the successes and not the failures. I want to experience the positive and not the negative. I am partial to certain kind of experiences. That is why I am driven by so much fear. I am not at peace with the changing nature of the universe. I want to handpick certain experiences as if they were a vacation.
I want to experience so much, but only the things I want to experience. This is how I designed my life. I can see that I will always be driven by fear then. Fear of not having enough time, of not having enough experiences. In this case, aren’t you only experiencing fear? The impermanent nature of life inherently offers us different experiences, emotions, and stories. By rushing to “catch them all”, you are stuck on one emotion, one story, one experience.
By preferring some experiences over others. We let fear reign. Then, we actually experience less because we are caught in the same cycle. If you truly want to experience, stay present and open to the things right before you.