Initially, this post seemed to be about dying into the moment and that was its working title. Working titles are quite Zen, I think. They are as impermanent as are the moments of our lives and just as complete in their birth, life, and death.
So the title of the post is now, “The Life Cycle of a Moment.” In another week in a different venue the title will change again as will the post but its essence, its cycle, will not. Whether similar or seemingly new, each moment cycles.
In Jake Fades: A Novel of Impermanence, dying into the moment is the doorway into the next:
“…dying now means coming to each moment fresh… Seeing every person, even your partner, as if you have never met before. Hearing the birds as if you have never heard a chirp in your life. Our past is what we think of as our life, that whole life of thought and memory that we carry around all the time, but nothing actually repeats itself. Every moment is new, and you cannot live this moment until you die to the past one.”
(David Guy, p. 172)
Yet to consider death as integral to every moment was quite a shift for me, and as often happens in Zen, my view of the world turned inside out. For me, opening to the ending inherent in every moment makes the familiar fresh, a wave worthy of its own experience.
Some moments are like riding on the crest of a whitecap while in others it is as if I am becalmed and awaiting a wind until the wave washes upon the sand. All moments pass only to return as life anew.
So, how long is a moment? Consider this math: there are 6,400,099,980 moments in one day; one finger snap=65 moments; dividing 65 into 6,400,099,980=98,463,077 finger snaps per day (Ruth Ozeki, Appendix A, p. 407, The Tale of the Time Being).
That is a lot of living and dying at a rate I can barely wrap my mind around. Yet, a snap of fingers is such an immediate image of impermanence that it makes a wave upon the sand seem like an eternity. And yet, both are.
“Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.”
(Ruth Ozeki, p. 408)
When awareness is the measure of the moment, any linear sense of time—such as a finger snap–fades into simply being, often enhanced by memory, flashes of moments similarly spent. Surely, the math of memory flashes is at least equal to, if not greater than, the number of moments in a finger snap.
And here we are near the end of another moment, perhaps measured more by awareness than by snaps of fingers or memory flashes. Well, that is what is true for me in this moment as it takes its place in the story that is me, maybe to return as a flash or maybe not.
We write (and read) stories to provide perspective on passing moments, recording the progress of our stories with working titles, changing with the measure of the moment.
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