“The two most difficult things humans do is being born and dying” is one of my favorite statements from Norman Fischer, a poet, author, and Zen Buddhist teacher and priest, (I had the privilege to listen to him and meditate with his group) “and everybody accomplishes them. So most other tasks should be easy.” They’re not. Either it’s the choice that makes it difficult: “green or blue plastic spoons?”, “Vanilla or chocolate?”, “stay or leave?” or it’s the missing choice: “will they let me buy them a drink? (maybe smiling helps)”, “being born or rather not”, “death or eternal life”(smiling does not help). In these excurses, the IRS (US tax authority) is often mentioned in combination with death, but there is a way to avoid paying taxes: just get very rich or create a hypercomplex net of off-shore companies or both.

The End

Now that we clarified that point, how about the end of things? I recently had a very inspiring conversation with several coaching colleagues about how they deal with the end of a coaching engagement. You support someone in their personal growth, they share with us their ways of being, and suddenly it’s over. Psychoanalysts have it so much better, they go on for 35 years, coaching is a well-defined and timed process with a clear end date and deliverables. Which makes coaching so powerful. We spoke about all sorts of ends and how we deal with them individually. Maybe the conversation was different for me, for all others it was already the end of the day, for me, it was just the beginning, one of the amazing things time zones do to you. (If you time your flight right, you can arrive the day before you left). I shared a quote from yet another teacher, whose texts I studied but whom I never met, as he spoke about life and its end. I’ll put the quote in question at the very end (pun intended). Everybody was somewhat taken aback by the radical statement and the negative outlook – which puzzled me a bit because I not only see the perspective as quite realistic and also positive in a way.

After the end

Are you worried that there will be nothing afterward? What happens to the little figure inside your body that’s “YOU”? Different — actually most if not all — religions and belief systems have an answer to this: there will be some form of afterlife. But do we care? We are of course people who care, care what happens to the rusty clunker we bought for $2000 and resold three years later for $2099, the house we used to live in, our classmates from kindergarten. We care a little bit.

Three weeks later we remember vaguely and even when we continue to care, we realize it’s their life, their car, their house.

If you look at your life the same way you look at the life of flowers, we can enjoy it even though it will wilt and end, no matter how much we love them. What will your lover think when you put the beautiful red roses you just received as an expression of love headfirst into the stinky compost bin, as they will die anyway?

As we accept all sorts of ends, we increase our capacity to enjoy life much more colorful, much richer, much deeper. There is a German saying “Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei” (Everything has an end, only the sausage has two – I was unable to confirm if there is an English term for the end of a sausage).

Vienna is famous for all sorts of songs about dying, how life is before and after death and that’s a bit morbid but after a few glasses of wine not so much.

Take a moment and cherish what you have, even and especially in the perspective that you don’t have it forever.

Here is as promised the quote by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center.

Photos: Sailboat Mary Tuano on Unsplash; VW Daniel J. Schwarz on Unsplash
Quote: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/506023