I finally rescheduled my visit down to see My uncle in New York. As I waited in line to cross the border from Canada into NY, I started thinking: This line, with all these fences and guards, it’s an arbitrary line, a conventionally agreed upon demarcation that makes one side America and one side Canada. Of course, those lines weren’t always there, once the land was open, roamed by people and animals that migrated place to place. It won’t always be there either, countries change, borders change, one day there won’t even be humans at all…

This is the kind of evidence I look for to help myself consider impermanence — borders can change, or along a border there is one thing on one side and another on the other. But this is all just evidence, SYMPTOMS. What is the evidence really showing me…?

The truth here is that what I construe as permanent: An identity, of a place, a person, or thing, exists only in the mind. Its arbitrary — though conventionally agreed upon — to call one side of a line Canada and another America; those clumps aren’t really real. Over and over it is becoming clear that fixation is happening with me, in my heart, perhaps in our collective hearts, but not in the world.

And yet, for something not even really real, nor actually out in the world, I suffer real pain. I suffer when my friends leave early. I suffer when I can’t go see family. I suffer when I can’t work out anymore post covid — losing part of the fit alana identity I have clumped up over so many years and given so much meaning to. I suffer when I am too sick to do the things I wanted/planned, the stuff I clumped up in my imagination as the fun future I would have.

Early on in practice I learned to see things aren’t as certain as I thought — hugging a homeless person doesn’t necessarily mean swine flu, and then death. Even if what I worry about comes true, it may turn out for the better. Or at least for the different. This is all true. But back then I felt like part of the puzzle was missing, these were half measures to sooth, they weren’t full understandings. But now I sense I am getting closer to seeing the bigger picture. All the clumps — the worries and the hopes, the imagined future and the curated past –they aren’t how the world really is. All my worries and all my hopes, are based on a fabrication, not on reality.

I spin, I suffer because I cling and fixate, but that’s on me –that isn’t how things actually are., I want things to be fixed when I like them, or to hurry up and un-clump, to move along, to flow away, when I don’t like them. But this isn’t how the world works. The world won’t change, so the only choice is for me to figure out how to.