This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

by Alan Lew

Spiritual practice won’t change what happens. Rather, it will help us to experience what happens not as evil, but simply as what happens.

Every moment, we take in a breath and the world comes into being, and then we let out a breath and the world falls away.

And every moment is a rehearsal for our death. From the day we are born, we are engaged in the process of dying, not only because the larger arc of our life is moving in that direction, but because we experience death moment by moment. We die to the world every time we breathe out, and every time we breathe in, every time our breath returns to us of its own accord, we are reborn, and the world rises up into being again.

Loss is inevitable. Entropy is a fact of life. What’s done cannot be undone—but it can be healed; it can even become the instrument of our healing.

Spiritually we are called to responsibility, to ask, What am I doing to make this recur again and again? Even if it is a conflict that was clearly thrust upon me from the outside, how am I plugging in to it, what is there in me that needs to be engaged in this conflict? Why can’t I just let it slough off me like water off a duck’s back, as I am able to do with so many other things?

It is only here and now, in this moment, in this place—in the present—that we can act. We cannot act in the past, we cannot act in the future, and most certainly we cannot act through someone else’s experience.