Deadlines and Impermanence

Deadlines are a self-imposed form of impermanence

In the opening to her wonderful and very raw book, A Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion wrote the following:

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question is self-pity.

It’s a memoir of the year following the sudden death of her husband, John.

According to Philip Lopate, Didion had an “uncanny ability to create an atmosphere on the page” and I can feel these lines.

I have not read past the first few pages. I want to sit with it, without distractions, and there are other books I must read before this one.

But what struck me in those first pages is how it's only when we are thrown into the chaos of impermanence that we can truly reflect on what is meaningful. As if we must be inside the pain to understand it.

No amount of words on a page, no matter how beautifully arranged, will ever suffice for experience for Wisdom is born of experience. But they can prepare us for that moment when we are thrust into its belly!

Welcome to this week's edition of The Contemplative Life.

And despite the gloomy beginning; there is a happy ending.

Let's Go!

What I was thinking about this week

The beauty of these first four lines from Didion is their simplicity.

Hard-boiled prose. Boiled right down to the bone. Raw but quiet self-reflective dealing with unprepared misfortune.

Knowing this, it's easier to see her mindset. The disbelief as she sits down for dinner, for the first time, in a long time, without him.

Yet at the same time, there is a hint of hope formed as a question. A moment of reflection, where she acknowledges the pain and the potential to lapse into self-pity. It is as if she is asking herself who will win—ego or wisdom.

This week I found myself reflecting on my own impermanence. Living with one foot in this life and another in the next is a strangely centering place.

I have started the process that will end in a memoir. I will call it Meditation or Die: the Search for Truth, Peace, and the Sacred. I've had the title of this book for some time now but I never understood what the book should nor could be about, until this week.

I hope to research and plan Meditate or Die as I am writing the Deep Meditation. Then begin writing after the first book is complete. I will possibly publish it here as a series (I’m told traditional publishers allow this.)

And as always the best kind of research always begins with books.

What I read this week

I've been on a book-buying spree over the last few weeks—30 books in total.

Some are anthologies of essays that will serve as reference books.

(I mentioned these in the previous week's letter. If you missed that edition you can read it here - https://clarkescott.substack.com/p/tcl-022-goals-for-2024)

Some are literary; others popular. Some fiction and others not. Some are Pulitzer Prize winners such as Angelas Ashes. Some are International best sellers such as When Breath Becomes Air.

The opening to this last book, too, is focused on the impermanence of life:

You that seek what life is in death. Now find it air that once was breath. New names unknown, old names gone; Till time end bodies, but souls none. Reader! Then make time, while you be, But steps to your eternity.

Only now am I seeing the theme of impermanence and its connection to deadlines. This truly is one of the most beautiful things about writing, and the reason I encourage writing as a spiritual practice.