Get Busy Living Or Get Busy Dying

In March of 2021 I lost my brother Neil to depression and alcohol. At his funeral I said “I was the one who was supposed to die”. I was the one who had gastric surgery to save my life as a consequence of booze and pills. I was the one who drank and drugged every day from 17 to 44. I was the one expected to perish. Neil suffered quietly with a lifelong depression which he statrted to treat with alcohol in his mid 60’s. Nobody believed it as they saw it right in front of them because he professed not l like the effect. (I could not believe anyone could even say that). My sobriety came not right after the surgery but almost a year later when I hit my bottom in September of 1999. He saw me change. He saw me grow. Somehow he was stuck in fear and shame and unearned guilt from childhood and could not reach out for help.

Get busy living or get busy dying, Neil, used to say to me, quoting the famous line in Shawshank Redemption that Morgan Freeman spoke. He loved that movie and loved that line. Two days after his death I started to write about it. Here it is:

Get Busy Living Or Get Busy Dying. Okay. Fair enough. Like many sayings, jingles, tropes, alliterations, this has a meter, a sense of rhyme, a continuity around it. But so does Mary Had a Little Lamb. Does that make it so? Would her lamb really follow her? Does it follow that if one is not living, one is dying? And even if it is, so, who is to be the judge of whether one is living or dying? What are the metrics? Surely, there must be some guideposts along the way in each person's journey, maybe a little like bouncing off the guardrails on the highway of existence.

And what does living feel like in comparison to dying anyway? Now, sure enough, we all are aware that people live and people die - is that it? If so, it could be said, well, get busy borning. Although it sounds kind of awkward at first, I guess it quickly makes sense. Born-ing and dying.

For while, we all are active in the rollout of our own lives, being born and what we were prior to that most amazing of events is equally as mysterious as where we go and what happens to us after we die. No, I don't think the saying refers to that most mystic aspects of our essential natures. I think it refers to a sense of quality, a sense of savor, a pressure, a pulse, a cadence, a flavor, if you will. Do we feel good about our journey or not? Do we feel a sense of largesse, of purpose, of optimism? Or do we feel a sense of diminution, of contraction, of negativity?

It must be said that all people deal with times of discord, of challenge, of negativity, of exhaustion. We all struggle. If not, there would be no need to even utter the words. This isn't what I'm talking about. We all know up in comparison to down. We all know in as compared to out. We all know hot in comparison to cold. And we all know purpose in comparison to purposelessness. Lost and found.

I think it is in this sense of purpose, this sense of reason to live, we may find kind of the object of the quest. In Daoism, the figure that we know as the Yin Yang symbol, that of the two teardrop Paisley shapes, is a representation of this relationship. It shows one black and one white with a spot of white in the black while the other is white with a spot of black.

This image is a static representation of natural ceaselessness. The Daoists call it immortal. It may be as close to their depiction of the universal essence or God as they understand it. It not only says that there is a relationship between up and down, in and out, emptiness and fullness, but they are part of a greater whole and each is in a ceaseless state of flux from one becoming the other.

Well, not exactly. It's that the potential for this change is ceaseless, that the relationship or the duality of things always exists. It is a characteristic of the universe as we know it. Whether the change will happen on our watch, that's another story.

Each individual in their own solitude, what I call the single soul philosopher, can be swooned by the magnanimity of this idea. From the furthest and hugest of galaxies to subatomic particles, to all the manifestations of matter to the process of life itself the interplay of opposites is a constant.

Now, I'm not a mathematician. So looking for facts from me is not only going to be fruitless, but it might be a reason to get off the bus. But I'm asking you to be seated for a few more minutes, because the bus we're on is circling back home. We spoke of certain qualities of living, a pulse, a pressure, a savor, a flow that waxes and wanes, and spoke of the duality of yin and yang, their ceaseless potential for manifestation. Do these two phenomena intersect? Where and how do these relate to each other?

Get busy living or get busy dying, my brother said often. Indeed, what is the key? Where is the lock? How do we untangle the mess to make sense of it all? I think we all know it is a matter of life and death, happiness and unhappiness, health or sickness, wealth or poverty. Although I may not have the complete answer, I think I can offer some clues that can start the process of distillation.

Who can watch while the muddy water settles, asks the Tao Te Ching. The Yin Yang symbol has something missing in it. So does the microscope. So does the telescope. Something is missing in plain sight. What is not seen is the observer. The observer is the unseen third entity which witnesses the potential and witnesses the dynamic of change.

The observer is the metric of all phenomena, but we lose it in plain sight. Why? There's probably a myriad of reasons. Some are cultural. Some are based on the premise and the assumption of science. Some are fear based. Some just discount the self as we're taught.

It does not matter right now why. What is important is that we notice that the observer plays a key role in noticing both the external and internal worlds. So much so, so important is this idea that quantum’s early workers and researchers developed a model called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which asserts that the observer to any event cannot be separated from the event.

It is not a big jump, and it seems then to be intuitively true, that consciousness makes what appears to be a duality a trilogy. 1) The world we see, 2) the ceaseless potential for things to manifest and 3) awareness. That part of our discriminating consciousness, which has the capacity to notice, makes for the Holy Trinity.

Dualities are favored by Western logic, but they're by no means the only metaphysical constructs. Christianity speaks to a Holy Trinity. Daoism refers to essence, life and spirit. Like a Faberge egg, the beautiful structures nest around each other. It is the artist who constructs them, who uses her vision, skill, insight and experience to make something of enduring beauty.

What is in the heart and mind of such an artist as she begins the journey? Does the finished work appear is in a dream, as in an apparition? Does it evolve as she works the materials, sources the products, plays with the methods? What are the metrics of value?

The materials we work with, which our tangible elemental cells are made up of, as well as the physical world, is so vast that we cannot apprehend all that we can see. And all that we can see is perhaps at most only a gnat’s weight in the totality of the universe.

But we can notice that which is most vital, close and near our own minds, our own thoughts. Our thoughts go constantly buzzing through our awareness, like geese in flight. We are mesmerized by their honking. They are going somewhere. But they won't say.

What is value? Like gravity, we still can't quite say what it is, but the whole universe respects it. What is sunlight? What is life, what is death? A compass will always point magnetic north. What is making it do so it does not know. But it knows in every fiber of its being that it's doing the right thing.

Similarly, plants grow toward the sun, galaxies swirl. All processes in the universe share this. They are all affected by forces, sometimes easily seen, sometimes not. The Moon is affected by gravitational influences of the Earth and Sun. This is easily seen. Once thought to be the center of the universe, we now know it is infinitesimal in the totality of the galaxy.

Similarly, my mind’s everyday thoughts are less than even that in the mind of total awareness. Yet, like the Sun and Moon, my everyday thoughts, lives, with their resentments, desires, jobs, deeds, details and dreams create the predictable regularity of my existence.

This is fine. We need predictability and regularity to survive and construct our worlds. It has value. Sleep, feeding, agriculture, knowledge, family, these and more dependent upon and the result of regularity in the universe.

However beneficial it is, however, excess can be detrimental. My regular thinking mind, like the Moon in relation to the Earth and Sun, becomes influenced by repetitive thoughts, which in and of themselves are neither good or bad. It is just an observable fact.

Are our repetitive thoughts bringing us to a place of lightness, quiescence, health, or to a place of frustration, darkness and sickness? Besides their admitted necessity, are they getting in the way of our awareness? Are they occluding a lightness of being?

The Earth Shadow is only visible during a lunar eclipse. It always exists. But it only becomes observable when it comes between the Sun and the Moon. It is then that we see the darkness of the Moon's shadow.

We too cast a shadow on those around us. It usually cannot be seen but makes itself apparent during times of forced reflection. When seeing ourselves as others see us or when we see how our thoughts are affecting others, we are transfixed.

These times of forced awareness of seeing ourselves momentarily and fleetingly can be humbling, eviscerating our spirit giving us pause, stopping us in our tracks. “I can't believe I did it again.”

Seeing ourselves as if from afar, as if another were watching, is like realizing there is an entire universe experience available to us while we rake muck. Will I have it? Can I have it? The why is unnecessarily uttered. Because it feels better. It feels right. Need anyone tell us what is right and what is wrong?

The loudest and closest to our minds is our own thinking. Our thoughts are the Sun, Moon and Earth of our minds, but they're infinitesimal in the sky of awareness. We have a heliocentric structure and thought with self as the center. The mind’s own invention is both the tool of discovery as well as its prison.

Will we be a slave to our own thoughts? Will I be a slave to my own thoughts all the time, or will we invite in more from the universe that created the majesty of all? Can we conceive of that? Admitting we were powerless over our own thoughts and our lives had become unmanageable is step one in Recovering the Way.

Having followed our own mind’s inclination to problem solving, to living, to health, to happiness, we are faced with a dilemma: that which we have used as the tool, the metric, the guidepost, the center of our experience, is not working well. We're faced with a frustration, anger, fear, and despair. Our own egos have told us that we ourselves are both everything and nothing.

Step two - hope versus despair. Despair is the absence of hope. Maybe more appropriately, a loss of hope, because we cannot grieve that which we have never had. One of the combinations of opposites we've spoken about is so centrally located to our own minds that it is almost inconceivable to us that it could be a constant in the universe. Hope versus despair.

Yet hope lights the internal higher self, banishing apathy and energizes us to consider banishing despondency. Where does hope come from? We don't ask where light comes from, where form comes from, where mass comes from, where process comes from. But hope? What is the purpose of the question?

I believe hope is beseeched. When we are bereft, and we're aware of bereavement, we're aware of loss. We can have unmanageability and powerlessness forever from an outsider's perspective. But peeking under the hood, until the driver gets out of the car and sees the mess, hopelessness does not exist.