I opened up a message this morning and saw a quote from LP Thoon. It said, “Once your parents’ four elements have arisen, their elements are subject to aging, sickness, and death. You have been born from elements subject to death. You have been born from elements subject to impermanence. The entirety of your elements must be subject to the impermanence your parents were subject to. However your parents are, that is how you are.

If your parents cannot cling to the notion that their bodies belong to them because everything must transpire according to the impermanence within itself, then you who have been born must also be just like them. If your parents are something that is not-self (anatta)–there is nothing that is their ‘self’–then how can you cling to the notion that you are their ‘self’? You must be just like your parents are. You must see how reality is in this way.”

I started thinking a little about this quote. My dad got pancreatic cancer and died. He is gone. There is no more Floyd, that atta has totally un-atta-ed. In the end, his body, that he had counted on, betrayed him. It got sick. Cells were triggered by something to mutate, to become toxic and cancerous instead of helpful for a body to function and live. This was the truth of my father’s body.

My mother had a terrible accident, she is still alive, but her body no longer functions as it did before, she has been crippled, had her mobility compromised and limited. Not just by the accident itself, but by the surgery she had to fix the damage done from the accident. At one point, in the hospital, she stopped being able to pee by herself, she had to be catheterized multiple times a day to pee. She was so desperate to just pee on her own. She told me she tried so hard to force it, to will her body to do this simple task that it had always effortlessly done before, but no amount of force or will could get the urine to come out on its own.

My own body has betrayed me just like my parents’ betrayed them. It does so on the regular: I want so badly to breath, but the asthma has gotten worse. A body I have honed to fitness with years of effort, one day was as breathless as an out of shape septuagenarian, mid run. 

In my last apartment, I wanted so much to stay, I had already signed a contact, I was on the hook for the rent. I wanted to just tough it up, but my environmental sensitivities simply wouldn’t allow it. I had  developed crushing chest pain, difficulty breathing, I feared staying in the apartment would kill me and I was forced to move.

 After covid, I was so exhausted, couch locked: Just like my mother, doing simple things I had done effortlessly before were past my will. I was so sick. The muscle built by all the years of fitness, training, were gone within a few months. My last body scan showed me weak, skinny fat, in the wake of post covid post exertion fatigue. Like my mother, I tried to make it better, her with her surgery, me with steroids, that ultimately made it worse.

 It really made me see, sure, I can act with this body, I can act on it, and those actions have consequences. Sometime consequences I like, like getting fit, sometimes ones I don’t, like getting sick and weak. But in the end, none of my actions, or their consequences, change what a body is, what it has always been. That’s the point of LP Thoon’s quote: The body is of this world, it is 4 elements, it shifts and changes according to causes and conditions as do all elemental objects. I can call it mine, sure, but what does that mean really? 

In my mind, I mine-ify this body to exempt it, to convince myself it is different somehow. I mine-ify this body so I can used it to differentiate myself. But it’s not different at all, it is like my parents’ body, like every body, so how can it differentiate me?  This is the thing to see about 4es: If these things I claim, believe are under my dominion, don’t obey me, what will? If my body can’t confirm my version of the world, or confirm I am somehow valuable, special, important, what will? This sick and breaking/breakable body can’t even stay healthy, it can’t even do the shit I want it to do, I can’t be special at all. I can’t be in control. This is a lie that exists in my mind alone.