The Time On The Stage

We each have our time on the stage of life. As we grow older, we observe those who come after us as being on the stage in their time, in their prime. We might be sadly nostalgic about how things used to be rather than understand that younger people find sustenance in different ways than we did, and most are adapted and grateful to live in their own time.

Transcript

Welcome to In the Deep.

I'm your host,

Katherine Ingram.

The following is from a Zoom session broadcast from Australia on February 7th,

2021.

It's called The Time on the Stage.

The other night,

I went to a gathering here where I live near Byron Bay.

The gathering was in Byron Bay.

It will seem like I'm talking about another world because it was a primary school field and it was ringed by food trucks of all these fancy cafes and restaurants and people with their street food trucks serving meals or nibbles or whatever you wanted.

And it was the opening night of this monthly event that's called Eat Street.

And there must have been 1500 people on the field milling about really smooshed together and then eating together and laughing.

Of course,

Not a single person was wearing a mask.

And I know it seems hard to believe,

But we don't have community cases,

So called.

And because everyone is being so careful and if you had a sniffle,

You wouldn't dare show your face in public.

We're actually protected even from the common cold.

You're in areas where pretty much no one is sick with anything and everyone's hand sanitizing on top of it.

So I know it seems crazy,

But even the mayor was there at the event.

Everybody was there.

So I'm only mentioning that part just so you're not too shocked to understand that I was actually a very crowded festival.

But as I was sitting there and watching all the beautiful young mothers with their beautiful babies in their little organic kung-kung cloth things that they carry them around in,

My mind was cascading down memory lane to so many other times,

Not only in this region,

Going back 18 years,

I've been to various festivals around here.

It's a popular thing.

Not even when I was younger,

Festivals of all sorts when I was young.

All the young,

Beautiful people and the music and the babies and all the little kids running around and the great food and all of these,

This wash of memories was flowing through in the realization or the recognition again that these are the people on the stage right now,

That this is the moment for them.

And lots of the young mothers I would have seen years ago,

Even here,

Or certainly all through my younger life,

Lots of those mothers carrying those babies are now grandmothers.

And those babies they were carrying are parents.

They had babies.

The babies had babies.

And I was awash in these poignant feelings about impermanence,

About the slipping away of time.

And the way that we might experience something at a particular place in a particular moment of our lives.

And we go back there and it has changed and we have changed.

And you realize you don't actually get to step in the same river twice,

Even though things might look similar.

And often they don't even look similar.

But this sense of this,

This wash of existence,

Just this rapid stream running.

And we keep clutching in our minds to something that we remember as what we call normal.

You hear a lot in the news,

We're going to get back to normal.

No,

We're probably not going to go back to whatever we thought normal was.

It might be as different as,

You know,

The Indians who used to have a Manhattan Island was their island.

And then it got sold and became New Amsterdam and you would know it as Manhattan.

Pretty different,

Probably not so normal to the people who were originally there.

So what we keep clutching on to as normal in our memories and in our hopes,

Maybe just such a profoundly painful illusion to adhere to.

And what if we just throw our hands up and say we,

And we're just in this stream rushing on as it's been doing all this time for the humans.

Things change really fast.

And in our time,

They really change fast.

We're in the fastest changing slot of history that there ever was.

When you think that Alexander the Great's armies went the same speed that Napoleon's went.

Things have sped up in our time for sure.

And our flexibility,

Our mental flexibility and our capacity to let go of what we had hoped might be some kind of return to normal,

What we hoped was on offer.

Well,

If it did,

If something did evolve that sort of looked like what we've known,

Well and good,

Great.

But it might not.

My bet is it won't.

Things are going to be much different.

And we'll find the jewels in those in the new ways.

And frankly,

I think all of us,

Especially we who tune to these kinds of frequencies have seen that as hard as the pandemic has been,

And I know in most of your countries,

It's far harder than here,

As hard as it might've been,

There have been gifts that it brought in terms of reflection,

In terms of contemplation,

In terms of setting the priorities,

Reminding you what you love,

What you care about,

Reminding you of the precariousness of existence,

Which always comes with a lot of insight.

And perhaps also it has allowed you to set free things that were dead weight in your life.

Perhaps some relationships have fallen away even that you saw that you can't afford to carry that weight.

We've lived,

In other words,

In deeper space within ourselves.

We've had to confront death much closer to us.

And we've had to realize,

Like Heraclitus said,

Change itself is the only thing that is unchanging.

Two things that I could get into,

As you know,

As you may remember,

I've got two great grandchildren now.

So I've been very aware of that process that you talk about of moving through stages of,

You know,

Having parents,

Being a parent,

Being a grandparent,

Seeing my children be parents.

Now I'm seeing my grandchildren being parents.

I'm seeing my daughter being a grandmother and she's loving it.

She's got such a beautiful granddaughter,

My great granddaughter.

Anyway.

Whether it's a great fortune in your life.

Yes,

I've been very aware.

And it can bring up really poignant moments.

Yes.

Yes.

Extremely poignant.

I think maybe I've had more poignant moments about the insight of life just going on and never getting back to how it used to be.

Yes.

Which is part of it.

More poignant moments than anything else.

Say,

You know,

Just relationships.

Just recognizing what life is.

The other thing is that I'm also really in touch with my family,

Who all,

Most of them who in one way or another work in London.

And what you say about a new normal,

This is something that people are talking about.

People are actually recognizing that we're not going to go back to the normal that we thought we were going to go back to.

I think people are so relieved in their lives about so many things.

Like for instance,

People who have to commute in crowded,

You know what crowded shoe trains are like,

To a crowded office.

So there's a whole new normality of totally deserted central areas because the shops are closed too.

These huge,

Fantastic office buildings in central London are all,

Well,

Largely vacated.

And you know,

People are working at home,

But also thinking,

This isn't so bad.

I can handle this.

There's so many interesting changes.

And I suppose you would need some kind of a psychological accountant to say whether the sum total of all of these things is actually a gift or not,

Because there's a lot of people having a really hard time at the same time.

There is a huge mental strain for people who are falling through the cracks and who don't just get to work at home and get paid and so on and so forth.

And also a lot of young people are really struggling because they're in the time of life when their social life is so important to them,

Their queer group and actually being,

You know,

Mashed together.

So there's a lot of that going on concomitant with what you're describing,

Where a lot of people are more relaxed in their lives and are able to not sit in rush hour,

Which is highly stressful.

Those kinds of ways of life.

So,

You know,

These are all things that maybe whatever we're going to come into in the next phase will shake out into a very different thing than it has before.

But my point in coming to terms with just intense impermanence,

Like this one,

This happens to be what we call the pandemic normal,

Then we'll have at some point a post-pandemic normal,

So called.

They just do keep evolving and the trick is simply to keep rolling with it.

Because I really notice and I think I noticed this in my friends and people who I'm speaking with,

Where I get stuck and caught is when I start being all nostalgic about our old life.

And I sometimes call it old world,

Which simply means 2019 and before.

I call that the old world.

You know that when I start being sentimental and nostalgic and overly yearning about the old world,

And I look at this that we're in,

Especially when I think about all the young people I know,

All the young kids in my family,

And so on.

That's where I get a bit caught.

I start noticing I get anxious and I start getting a little bit mopey.

And I have to really take myself in hand and remind myself,

Number one,

Kids everywhere,

When they come into a circumstance,

That's their circumstance.

That's their moment here.

That's their stage.

They're at play on their own stage.

I've told this story many times in Dharma dialogues,

But it's a moment that it could be told again.

One of my friends was in Bombay,

Used to be called Bombay,

Many years ago.

And he was in some horrible slum area and it was dusk and it was super polluted.

It was just a vision of hell for him.

And he said there were these kids,

Young kids,

They had like a stick and a can at the end of the stick that they were rolling around as like a little device of a go device.

And some other kid had a string with some cloth on it that he was pulling around as a kite.

And they're squealing with laughter and playing and having fun.

And he's watching this.

He's from Ireland,

Lives in this most beautiful enchanted part,

Wicklow,

As you know.

At the time he didn't live in Wicklow,

But now he does,

But he lived near.

And he came from another world,

Like a heaven world.

And he's looking at what he might've defined as a hell world.

But for those kids,

That was just their world,

Right?

Heaven and hell there every day as with all of us.

And I was very struck with that because I realized,

And I think about it a lot,

I think about things like that a lot when I start fretting about the normal childhood that my little ones in my family are not going to get to have.

And even all my friends,

Even my any of my younger friends as well,

Who I can see they're,

You know,

They're not going to get to do this 60s and 70s like we did.

Like that,

Those incredible heydays of such freedoms and hope and joy and just all of that.

It's really the memories and the wishing and all of that that becomes the torment.

And the surrender is in,

Okay,

Life presses on,

Pressed on through bubonic plague and through wars of every kind and people,

Women dying in childbirth at young ages,

Very,

Very frequently,

Just on and on the endurance that the human spirit has had to have in the most remarkable,

Stressful situations and yet carried on.

So I find myself anytime I'm starting to fall into,

Oh,

This,

You know,

Another day of this for the world,

Not so much for us here at the moment,

It will probably change,

I take myself in hand and I basically say,

Wait a minute,

This is a beautiful day and plenty to be grateful for.

And if I'm going to focus on the gratitude,

Then there's a whole lot,

There's a big long list.

Yeah.

I think in that sort of space where there's a bit of despair,

In a similar way,

I have something that I remember myself,

Which is I take a very long view,

An anthropological view of human beings.

And say for instance,

You look at European history of the last 300,

000 years in which there were two ice ages,

People to a certain extent,

Some of our really ancient ancestors existed on the edge of the ice as it receded and as it grew again.

So you can just see that what we've evolved for is survival.

We move and we survive through all kinds of circumstances.

That's been going on for thousands and thousands of years,

I think.

Everything.

I have a question,

Catherine.

Sure.

So this doesn't maybe relate directly to what you were open with tonight,

But maybe so.

Let's see if I can weave it together.

On I think your last podcast,

You mentioned something at the end of your little talk.

And you said something like,

The only real freedom is found in being.

I don't know if you remember that or not.

What I said was that your mind is creating your sense of freedom and it's also creating your sense of being in a prison.

Curious comment.

And I don't want to dissect it.

I don't want to philosophize about it.

But being is kind of a subtle thing to be talking about or pointing to.

So just for clarification sake,

When you say freedom is found in being,

Are you talking about like our sense of existence and our sense of aliveness?

And how would you characterize that being?

Right.

I just want to be specific,

Though,

Because I don't think I said freedom is found in being necessarily.

It doesn't sound quite like what I would how I would phrase it.

But I often do talk about just being right.

But in any case,

How I experienced being and how probably you experience being as well.

It's not esoteric.

It's really ordinary.

It's that you you wake up in the morning and perhaps before you really come into full consciousness,

You are aware of being you have self-awareness.

Yes,

Of being.

That's it.

And so there's a kind of attuning of the awareness that can start hanging out in just being.

So mostly we hang out in conceptualization.

Humans,

We really like to think we it's a it's a,

You know,

It's a superpower we have.

We like to think we like to conceptualize and we go around.

I sometimes call it like heads on sticks,

Basically.

It's like a head on a stick.

That's it.

That's all that's going on ahead.

With if you could picture in the cartoon,

A bunch of swirling stuff going around in the head,

That would be even better.

And we forget and we miss the being part.

So there's a way to start training the attention essentially to keep resetting back to this very simple sense of an animal breathing,

Seeing,

Tasting,

Hearing,

Smelling,

Not just some thinking creature,

But a full sensory creature.

You don't have to stop thoughts,

But you don't have to be obsessed with them and have to listen to every one of your crazy opinions about everything.

And every other thing that's flowing through the atmosphere,

You can take a step back.

Last night,

I said on the podcast downstream from thought is just this beingness.

And the more you hang out in the beingness,

It's not that it will entirely transform the nature of the thoughts,

But it actually does throw in a whole lot more insight into the thought process.

That was it.

I just honestly wanted to hear you.

When somebody talks about that,

Especially somebody who's well versed in it,

It has a vibratory capacity that's actually the transmission.

So I just wanted to hear you transmit it a little bit.

I have a new grandson,

He's three months old and I babysit for him a couple of times a week.

And I just sit there and hold him and he's totally in that state.

I mean,

There's nothing going on up here.

He's just all being.

And it's just so refreshing to be in his presence.

I know.

I actually do think it's one of the reasons why we sort of feel a bit high when we're around babies or puppies or any little creatures or any big creatures that are more close to that pure essence of being.

Whereas when you're with humans and you realize they're just constantly thinking,

Strategizing,

They have agendas,

You're on guard some of the time,

You know,

And if you sense when you're with a human that they don't really have much of that going on,

You're more relaxed,

Way more relaxed.

You know,

One time at one of our retreats in the wilds of Oregon and a big wild forest there called Brighton Bush Hot Springs.

It actually burned down most of it in the fires that just happened in the last year.

But I think they're going to rebuild.

But it's been there for many decades.

In any case,

One of the people in attendance at the retreat on about the fourth or fifth day of the retreat,

He was standing in the forest.

He's a tall guy and a bird landed on his shoulder.

A wild bird came and landed on him.

Now,

Obviously that indicates a kind of stillness that is pretty rare.

You know,

Not many of us would have the experience of a wild bird just coming and landing on you in the forest on your shoulder.

So it goes to this quietude of being that we find so refreshing when it occurs for us.

Sometimes it occurs randomly or,

You know,

You're just minding your own business and suddenly you look up at the moon and you have a moment of stillness.

People often experience things like that at a bedside of someone dying or something being born,

A baby or a kitten or something.

You know,

There's those moments that just stop you out of time.

You're not in time.

You're somehow entered into a dimension of just the essence of what aliveness is and what death would portend as well.

Like in the presence of a death,

Your own aliveness is in stark contrast.

So you're experiencing that as well.

These are just simple words and doorways pointing to something that I can't articulate,

But that we all,

It's so familiar to you.

It's actually the very most familiar thing you know is your actual taste of beingness.

When you wake up in the morning and you don't even know yet your name and you certainly don't know your to-do list,

Right?

But there you are.

And that's a very nice place to hang out.

It's just nice.

We have to do a certain amount of conceptualization in our lives.

I spoke about it last night.

Most of us are employed using our minds.

Our minds are the tool of our employment and we have to use our minds in these thinking ways for some portion of the day.

But a lot of the time when we're off,

Right,

Our minds are still very busy,

You know,

Just unnecessarily busy and often ingesting things that are making us feel bad and making us scared and making us agitated and lonely and just,

And that's often what our minds are up to if left to their own devices unless one has very,

Very lucky conditioning in which their mind doesn't tend to do that or you have some kind of wherewithal to redirect your attention.

That's what I always recommend.

Redirect your attention into this freer space.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

You're welcome.

You know,

The idea of having things come toward you,

That kind of encapsulates the last two weeks of my life.

There have been many things,

One of which is my business has kind of hit rock bottom and no surprise,

But I've seen it coming for a while and you know,

Here it is and I'm still here and I still get up in the morning and I can get through the day and you know,

There's little glimmers without doing much effort of things not being as bad as I thought,

Which is often the case.

I think for me,

You know,

Part of it is just the awareness of,

Okay,

Here it comes,

What can I do?

And then I realized there's really nothing,

You know,

I just be like water as they say.

For a long time I used to wonder what was it going to be like or how could I prepare myself when my mother was alive,

When she was going to pass away?

You know,

What,

How would I,

What could I do to be ready for it?

And I realized there was nothing and it was just going to happen and I would react the way I was going to react.

And it just seems that between the pandemic and the financial crisis and the political unrest and COVID and all these things we've all been experiencing,

I mean,

They've all been coming at us probably for a while.

We just didn't,

Didn't realize that.

I mean,

Certainly the environmental crisis has been,

I mean,

My first awareness was probably in 1969 that something was up.

And I think we talked a little while ago about Neil Young's song After the Gold Rush.

And in that song,

He said,

Look at Mother Nature on the Run in the 1970s.

And the newer version I've heard by Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton,

It's,

You know,

In the 20th century.

Well,

Now it's in the 21st century.

And,

You know,

We have a much better grip on the indicators that things aren't going very well.

And I mean,

That's coming too.

I mean,

How is that going to affect our lives?

And so maybe that's the new normal.

If that's,

I hate to overuse the word,

But lots is happening in all of our lives.

And,

You know,

Incrementally,

Some of the things may get better.

I mean,

The COVID response may finally come about and things start to die down.

And,

You know,

In my case,

My business may survive.

And even if it doesn't,

I'll be fine.

So that's just kind of a rambling about things coming at you.

And,

You know,

I see them and it's like,

Okay,

You know,

They're piling up,

Sometimes there's two or three or four.

And right now there's more than that all coming at the same time.

And I think,

Boy,

Five years ago,

10 years ago,

I wouldn't have been able to stand up to one or two of them.

But we get better at it or we just get used to it.

Yeah,

And we get better at letting go of what's,

Like a lot of what makes all of these things hard is various forms of our own internal resistance and thinking this shouldn't be like this.

And we were struggling against the exhaustion of that feeling,

Right?

When you surrender and just say,

Well,

It is like this.

And then you're just handling the details as you go,

Right?

You're just handling details and flowing on to the next thing and the next.

I spoke last night on the session about just,

I've been thinking just a lot about other times in history and other lives even today,

Where every day is what we would consider a struggle,

Like what any of us on this call would consider a really hard struggle.

And how do they do it?

How do they do it?

But then you realize,

You know,

We might develop that kind of strength bit by bit when we're just sort of thrown into the deep end or when enough things come at us,

Then we've handled them.

We develop some kind of confidence,

Some kind of muscle we don't know yet that we have.

And we've all already been tested a lot.

We've all found strength in different circumstances that were really damn hard,

You know,

And we somehow got up the next day or the day after a week later,

You know,

We somehow did.

So I just say to us,

I say all the time,

Have courage,

Right?

Have courage.

I love Leonard's quote,

So come my friends,

Be not afraid.

We are so lightly here.

It is in love that we are made in love with disappear.

Now,

You come much more to a settled feeling about this being a short run,

No matter how long it is.

You have to have some relationship to that very poignant understanding,

That powerful Dharma understanding,

Such that you can just let go a lot more easily.

So we can adapt to change.

We've been adapting to change.

We've actually done a pretty good job as a world community with some unfortunate outliers,

But for the most part,

People have been pretty cooperative through this time,

Pretty cooperative.

And perhaps that is some kind of blessing that kind of exercised a muscle that we'll be needing going forward.

But in any case,

However it plays out,

Each of us individually makes our own choices and uses our own attention in ways we think are wise and intelligent.

And that's my great encouragement to you that each of your days is,

How am I using my attention today?

I spoke last night about the importance of feeding your soul,

Feeding your spirit,

Making sure that you're keeping yourself topped up in a nice place as best you can and with whatever your delights might be,

Let yourself have them because it's great for other people to be around you and it's great for you.

It's like medicine,

Really healthy medicine.

So let yourself,

Be sure to let yourself be fed in those ways.

And that gives you a lot of strength to carry on.

You know the way that a good laugh,

Like a really good belly laugh about any old thing.

It's almost like you just feel you've just had an infusion of some magical substance that's lit you up and it sustains you for a few hours at least.

So have your attention scanning for the things that make you happy or at least peaceful,

Even better peaceful actually.

I really encourage you to feed your joy.

It's a counter to fear.

Counter to fear.

I think that one of the things that would be fearful about dying is that you didn't feel you had fully lived.

So that's another insight to keep in mind.

Really let yourself fully live these days.

You talk about things you can't change,

Like the city going up next to Australia from China or some of the climate change issues,

But accepting things as they are for things that you can change.

You know,

I said I came from Portland and there's the Black Lives Matter issue and there's lots of other issues happening there right now.

How do you not reconcile but know when to just accept and say it is and I'm at peace with that and when to jump in and say I need to do something about this and I can do something about this.

So is your question,

Let's assume that it's something you can do something about.

So let's take off the table the things you actually can't control.

And so your question is if I can do something about it,

Should I try to do something about it?

Is that it?

Yes.

And obviously small things we can do something about,

That's a no brainer.

But the things that are larger but significant,

Let's say justice issues or something that you can be part of the solution,

But it takes away from your tranquility and peace and accepting things that you have a small voice in but maybe not significant.

Okay.

I can only answer this question from my own way of playing things,

Which is just my way.

And because we're each built differently,

Your way might be very different.

For me,

I let passion move me.

So if I feel passionate about something,

And I need to get involved,

Because I won't feel peaceful if I don't,

Right,

If I don't speak up,

If I don't do the thing or say the thing or involve myself in a certain circumstance,

Then there'll be a kind of restlessness inside,

A niggling story that's going on inside.

And so it's that very discomfort of non action that would move me to action,

Even if the action has with it,

Some hassle or some kind of stress,

That's the price you pay.

If I'm trying to move myself,

Because I think it's the right thing to do,

But I don't really feel the passion,

The energetic passion that I need to do it,

Then I don't do it.

And I've tried that out.

I've played out this theory many times both ways.

I've involved myself in things that were seemingly righteous causes,

But were became not that interesting to me and not that connected to my heart.

And I've had to,

I've had to stop them sometimes quit something.

And on the other hand,

I've also tried it to hold my tongue about certain things.

And then that became impossible,

Right,

So that I've had to end up speaking out and take whatever arrows or hits that come with it,

But it was better than not speaking out.

So that's,

That's my way.

I have an internal barometer that just tells me when I'm at peace in any decision about involvement or non involvement.

So knowing,

If I'm reading it correctly,

Or hearing correctly,

Knowing what's right for your individual situation.

But if it causes you lack of peace,

But you still have passion,

Right on that knowing that there's gonna be some uncomfortableness and it's not you're not going to be in a tranquil,

Just being state,

But you are going to be Even if it causes some lack of peace that the non action would have caused more unrest inside of me.

Right.

So I mean,

You see this historically,

Of course,

With people like Martin Luther King Jr,

Who the more he spoke out,

And especially in the lead up to his assassination,

You know,

He knew,

He predicted it that he was going to be assassinated,

He kept,

You know,

Kept warning.

And there's this beautiful line,

I almost cry every time I think of it,

You know,

He says,

Like all of you,

I would like to live a long life,

Longevity has its place.

And then he said,

You know,

He's talking about you will get to the mountain top,

I may not get there with you.

That he was a relatively young man when he was struck down.

And yet,

Something in him,

The passion in him,

Could not be assuaged by just sort of making nice and playing the game in some other way.

He knew that the words he was saying,

Were for a much larger,

A much,

Much greater presence on this earth than his life.

Such as it was,

Which was an amazing life,

But his personal life had to be of no consequence to him.

Now,

Could he have just sat on that?

No,

He couldn't.

So as bad as his cost was,

His life itself,

It was harder to not speak.

And that's what a lot of people have gone through in history.

It's a lot and a lot of people even now,

Not just in history,

We see it all the time.

These brave hearts who speak out at any cost.

I'm not really made that way.

I think maybe when I was younger,

I might have been a little more brazen.

But at this point,

I really pick my battles in that regard.

I speak up if I feel it's impossible to stay still about it.

But a lot of things I can let go.

That makes sense.

I guess I'm also giving you permission to not force yourself into circumstances,

Just because it's on the side of whatever that you think is some righteous cause that maybe you could sit some out and go with the pull rather than the push.

Let the thing pull you.

And then you're willingly going to pay any price,

You know.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Reviews

This is probably the fifth time I’ve listened to this talk. Usually it’s when I’m going to sleep that I turn to Insight Timer. So often I listen again. It’s always a bit surprising that I hear more and more of the essence of your talk. A rambling conversation to say how I resonate with your life experiences. Here I am at age 84 having become a widow’ 16 months ago. We were married with me as a teenager and him at 21 Just a couple of kids who fell in love. Now I think how fortunate we were to grow up together and have a good relationship until his death. Thank you for listening to my ramble. With gratitude 🙏