The last day of your life

‘So what is significant?’
‘That today might be the last day of your life.’
George Ivanovich laughed mockingly. ‘But doesn’t everyone know that?! Everyone knows that today could be the end of it all!’
The man in the turban paused.
‘Everyone knows it my friend. But not everyone feels it. Everyone knows it as a theory but it’s only significant if felt in the marrow of your bones. Do you feel it in yours?’
Simon Parke A Vicar, Crucified, Ch.18

This puts everything in perspective.

What if today were the last day of my life?

Suddenly, all my plans for a future – in which I have arrived, made it, achieved enlightenment (an oxymoron if ever I heard one!), got the recognition I deserve, become knowledgeable, made my fortune – all these plans have to be let go of, in fact are shown up as an escape from truth, from freedom, from myself.

Suddenly, it becomes ok to sit and watch the ducks on the river flirting, the new leaves on the trees, the people walking by exercising their dogs.

Today might be the last day of your life. Come back to this body. Sink into being – the rapture of being. You may not know who you are, but you can experience the amazing unlikeliness that you are. Then you are in relationship with everything else that is. Wherever you are is home because you belong wherever you are.

Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision;
Rilke First Duino Elegy

Wherever there is a tree there is home.

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