I went to a family reunion in upstate New York and my aunt pulled-out her old photo albums. She handed me a pic of three teenage boys standing in a row and asked, “do you know who that one in the middle is?” I took a few wild guesses before she told me it was my dad.  Shocked, I grabbed the picture for a closer look; I was so close to my dad, I loved him so much, I thought I would be able to recognize him anytime and anywhere. But the truth is, I simply couldn’t see my dad in the image at all, it looked nothing like the adult dad I knew.

After I got home, I started thinking about how my own body changes over time. In just the few month since my move, depression eating and fearing the bustle of NY so much I had trouble going outside, had led me to pack-on the pounds. Still, I stare into the mirror and can’t say exactly when, at what moment in time,  I got fat. Its not just bodies that change in this way — trees grow, clouds morph as they slowly inch across the sky.

A while back, LP Anan had asked my help editing one of Laung Por Thoon’s sermons, Uturn, and there was a quote that had really stood out at me: “Sammuti (supposed form) is the sole thing in which we are lost. We are lost in physical form. Because of Khana [continuous and connected arising and falling], we are lost in the physical form. We have to break through the concept of Khana. That is, we have to see through the Sammuti of this physical form.”

My imagination (sankhara) alone is what makes objects (rupa)  that I am familiar with/ remember ( sanna)  seem so singular and real. It is why I don’t think “new alana” when I look at my increasing waistline or “new cloud” as I watch a cloud shift as it travels across the sky. I mean, clearly, there is some point at which my mind can no longer hold the illusion of sameness, an end so definitive that I just have to say, “a rotting wooden stump is not a tree.” But till that point, my mind deceives me, sells a lie of sameness, of identity, of permanence which, if you have been reading along this blog for a while you know, is WRONG VIEW NUMERO UNO!

When I really think about it hard enough though I have to admit that there is plenty of proof that my imagination is giving a pretty incomplete picture. After all, I believed I would know my beloved dad anywhere, but his picture as a teen was totally unrecognizable to me. It was only after my aunt told me who it was that I absorbed that fact, that image, and fit it into my Dad Timeline, the sense I have of who he was. Now, my dad (deceased years ago) has a new life, totally independent of me, and again he is outside the bounds of what I can imagine. Which is all to say that despite the fact that my dad clearly had an existence before and after I knew him, my view of his identity, his dadness, is totally bound-up with my recognition of his supposed form ( Sammuti ). 

In truth, my dad’s appearance changed a ton over the years. There was that crazy 70’s fro when I was a young kid, the buttoned-up business look as he grew more successful, there was thin and emaciated dad on his deathbed. The changes weren’t just confined to his looks, there was hippy anything goes dad of my childhood and stricter rules dad of my teenagehood. There were days he was funny and days he was dull, days he was patient and days he was short tempered, there were changing jobs, changing wives, changing houses, changing circumstances that peppered the time I knew him. So much morphing and yet, like that cloud, I always just thought of him as dad. My dad is long gone already, but what that shock at his teenage picture tells me is that I am still lost in his supposed form.