This morning I thought about dying.

I was sitting on the couch in my living room, petting the cats (we start the day like that, a comforting tribal event), and there it was, the question:

‘What if I’d die today?’

In a split second, I felt the thick pain of leaving this world with still so many unfulfilled dreams floating around.

I thought about the people I’d leave behind, and how it would affect their lives, at least temporarily.

Life. Gone. BOOM.

A heavy sadness, a deep, crushing dread, washed over me.

In an instant.

The cats didn’t know.

They didn’t notice the lump in my throat.

They just wanted their cuddles.

But we, we can do this.

It’s the herd of pink elephants in the room of human existence.

We can experience worlds of feeling, everything included, because of ONE single thought.

We can get lost in storylines and overwhelmed by mental scenes and suggestions and images, and we will be, and we are.

Imagination rules our lives.

All the time.

Now you probably know that I talk and write about this a lot, and exploring the process has softened up the usual tightness of the system tremendously, but I’m obviously still part of the system, and still affected by it.

So I get lost too, for sure.

Because what makes it so incredibly difficult and challenging AND fascinating and amazing, is that thoughts mostly don’t feel like thoughts, but like the world.

Thoughts feel like life itself, not merely a small part of it.

And even if we know this somewhat or more than somewhat, we’re still in it.

I guess most of us don’t appreciate this enough, don’t recognize it enough, and don’t include this enough.

Me too.

It’s a beautiful, horrifying, mesmerizing phenomenon, and we hardly take that into account, BECAUSE of its beautiful, horrifying, mesmerizing qualities.

We don’t see it because the feelings are just too real, and they include all of our senses in a perfect and totally compelling symphony of human emotions.

We don’t think about it, most of the time, because the mind is already heavily occupied.

And we absolutely need it to experience pasts and futures and expectations and disappointments, but we hardly ever realize that it’s not who we ARE.

Knowing who we are, at the core, opens up the playground that life can be.

Thoughts still feel real and important and, well, like life, but a sense of deep awareness will survive them all.

It will be BIGGER than our changing experiences.

This morning I was dying.

The bad news was bluntly delivered by my mind.

Fortunately, the diagnosis was completely off.

Like it is most of the time.

Maybe you just needed to hear this again.

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(Photo by @elalfie, for Unsplash)