Rebecca and I just returned from Houston and a visit with Rebecca’s son, Jonathan, and spouse Suzanne and three year old Irene (Inie). In “Cool McCool,” Rebecca writes about another aspect of our most recent visit. In this blog, I want to reflect a bit on how every ‘thing’ and every ‘body’ has a limited number of days.
Every time I visit Houston and see the Astrodome dwarfed by NRG stadium. I remember my dad in 1966 coming back from a business trip to Houston full of wonder about his experience inside what was then called the Eighth Wonder of the World. Today the Astrodome is easy to miss for the thousands of people passing by each day on Interstate 610 and barely registers with anyone under the age of 60. Inevitably that same fate will befall NRG, some day, for its days are numbered as well.
My son Ben re-introduced me to Bob Dylan about 15 years ago and Dylan’s “Mississippi,” with its first verse that contains this blog’s title is my favorite Dylan stanza. Here it is: “Every step of the way we walk the line, Your days are numbered, so are mine, Time is piling up, we struggle and we scrape, We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape.”
The Astrodome’s days are numbers, so are mine. So are yours! As for me, my exact days including today are 25,673. A few years ago I discovered the To Do Institute that offers online courses and other resources on “alternative methods of mental health such as Morita and Naikan from Japan.” The Institute’s journal is called “Thirty Thousand Days: A Journal for Purposeful Living.” The thirty thousand days comes from the average life span in countries like the USA.
One way to live a purposeful life with whatever time we have left is to remind ourselves how close we are to 30,000 days. When I subtract 25,673 from 30,000 not only am I reminded that I learned to subtract so long ago that I now need my phone calculator, but the 4,327 days I may have left remind me I will not live forever. Each of us knows none will get out of this life alive but it is so easy to think ‘I’ just might be the exception.
Rebecca’s house in Clarinda is next to a cemetery and my house in Decorah is down the block from a funeral home. With reflection, each offers an opportunity to move from what Heidegger (this insight comes from Irvin D. Yalom’s Staring at the Sun) called the everyday mode of existence, from HOW things are in the world, to the ontological mode, THAT things are. When I die, the absence of ‘THAT I am’, makes ‘HOW the world is’, no longer relevant.
The late Indian Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello suggested the following meditation in his book Awareness as a way of reminding us of death so as to remind us of the value of our life.
“Imagine that you’re lying flat in your coffin and you’re dead. See the body decomposing, then the bones, the ‘it’ all turning to dust. Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything , doesn’t it? Do this for a minute or so each day and you’ll come alive…When you’re ready to lose your life, you live it.”
One of my favorite films is Ikiru (To Live) by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It is available on Prime and well worth two and a half hours of your time. It is about a middle aged Japanese bureaucrat who learns he has terminal stomach cancer and what he learns about what it means to live in his final months. Ikiru is one of most uplifting films I have ever seen and one that reminds me to live each day to the fullest, with as much kindness and compassion as I can muster.
