Sinking In A Swimming Pool

There is a peaceful solitude to submerging in a pool and hanging around at the bottom for a while. Water diffuses sound, so whatever noise is occuring above the surface becomes calmed and muted below. The sensation of floating and the rapid micro-bubbles that flit around your body add to the zen-like experience.

Being Invisible

It is a small fantasy of mine to become invisible. My desire to be unnoticed usually presents itself when the pressures of life bear down on me so much that I instinctually retreat into my subconscious. When I feel the need to withdraw from reality, some aspect of the environment I am in becomes my secret hideaway. If I am in the bathroom washing up, it is down in the shadows between the bottles of moisturizer, shaving cream, and hair gel. If I am in the park, it is the recess between the roots of a large tree. It is usually a place that is small, dark, and cozy. There, I wish I were lying safe, where no one could find me.

My desire to not be found comes from a barely conscious longing to experience the sense of safety I had as a child – to regain the feeling of certain surroundings filling me with comfort and security, as a five year-old who climbs into his parents’ bed after a bad dream. Somewhere in time we lost the inviolable security we had as children, and I often miss it, and resent that I must now take full care of myself.

The inevitability of becoming a noticeable entity that is constantly at the whim of its environment is difficult to accept. Invisibility tempts me with its promise to provide a complete respite from the worries and fears of the outside world. While I do value my self-dependence, sometimes it would just feel good to wrap myself in the security of anonymity, and let everyone and everything go.

Live Your Life

Forty years from now, you will nostalgize about today. You will think back to the present moment, recalling how youth was full of choices and hopefulness. You will marvel at how blissfully uninformed you were about what the future held in store for you. The life you live right now will be a distant, golden memory.

Knowing how much you will value these days when you are older, how can you allow yourself to hurry through life? How can you not realize that every shred of your short existence is valuable? Each time you notice your days disappearing into an anonymous past, it should become more evident that you need to be living life as consciously as possible.

We all wonder sometimes about the purpose of life; often, we do so because we are searching for a way to justify death. And yet, the only way to understand death is to fully experience our everyday lives. Living life consciously involves thoughtful observation – not just of the outside world, but of our inner life. We should be taking note of our sense of identity at a particular time – our level of confidence, our anxieties, our far-flung wishes. If we have some record of our state of being at a given point in time, we can observe our personal evolution and ultimately gain some insight into our patterns and purpose.

And yet, as arduous as it may seem to keep track of all of our internal and external events, the feat can be achieved easily if we simply relax our definition of time. If we can view time as an invention of humans – and therefore not as linear and infinitely-accumulating as it seems in the abstract – we realize that life, and memory, are our collage to paste together however we wish. All the clues we need to figure out life’s meaning come from examining the collage as a whole and finding patterns of passion, compulsion, and purpose.

Therefore, experience the present vividly as it unfolds. In an ecstatic moment, allow the chemicals in your brain to percolate. Taste the pleasure as it pours out. In a bitter moment, allow the pins of pain to push through you. Fight the urge to close your eyes. Imbibe and absorb your emotions as if you were a child experiencing them for the first time. It is only through active involvement in your life, however exciting or mundane, that you can start to draw conclusions about why you are here.

In the end, this kind of conscious existence will give you far more solace than even the most successful unexamined life. For only those who have a clear vision of living can accept their passage into the next expanse.