From: When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

by Pema Chodron

“We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough
or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from
the point of view of someone who is awake, that’s death.
Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed
and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of
death. It doesn’t have any fresh air. There’s no room for something
to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by
controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for
failure, because sooner or later, we’re going to have an experience
we can’t control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love
is going to die, we’re going to find out we have cancer, a brick is
going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, somebody’s going
to spill tomato juice all over our white suit, or we’re going to arrive
at our favorite restaurant and discover that no one ordered produce
and seven hundred people are coming for lunch.

“The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet,
and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes
it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you
feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie
up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it
involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something
aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the
rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be
continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in
no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and
fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the
awakened point of view, that’s life.”

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