Put Your Hands In The Clay

When my grandmother had Alzheimer’s, she’d often sit in front of the mirror and talk to her long-dead parents. “Sometimes I fly with them through the streets of Vienna,” she’d say. At first, her behavior unnerved me, but then I wondered: How can I be sure her experience is a delusion? Perhaps it’s I, with my rigid sense of time and space, who am deluded. Who knows for sure?

The Buddha once said that if you’re going to claim anything as your “self”, you may as well choose your body, which at least endures for decades. Your mind, on the other hand, keeps changing from moment to moment, like a monkey swinging on branches, dropping one perception, grabbing onto the next.

Memory and time are themselves not absolute truths: we’re constantly constructing and reconstructing what happens, what happened. As years go by, we piece together the story of our lives in new ways. And finally, a day comes when we no longer piece anything together at all. The pieces just explode and hang in the air, like confetti.

When you see this, you see that clinging to the past or placing demands on the future is like grasping smoke. Longing for how things used to be, replaying old hurts, fearing what may come — these are not only futile, they delay the real work of noticing how we’re relating to this present moment. For it is here, in the midst of our sorrows and joys, that we both assemble reality and can develop more skill in doing so.

But you have to forget your defeats, your trophies, your plans, and plunge in — here, now — like a potter at the wheel, hands in the clay, shaping your life as it spins. The wheel isn’t going to stop. Detachment isn’t going to help. But while the clay of your life is still wet, you can shape it. You can still be happy. And if not through the streets of Vienna, you still can fly, with an unburdened heart, into vastness of this moment.