Remember, You Will Die

Reclaiming Attention as an Act of Resistance

Castlerigg Stone Circle, England

This morning, while eating a breakfast burrito in a favorite cafe, a familiar question arose:

Where will I be when I take my last breath?

What will it feel like? Will I be satisfied, terrified, clinging, resentful, at peace?

The contemplation was interrupted by a message arriving on my phone. That led me Instagram. That led to Reddit. My burrito started getting cold. An awareness of dissatisfaction kicked in and I felt into my body. It’s only 8:30 am and attention fatigue is already activated.

Some more sips of coffee followed. I clicked to a browser tab to keep writing my therapy notes, and then got distracted again, seeing a chart depicting unprecedented ocean temperature rise on Facebook. Summoning my discipline, I brought myself back once more to my body, recognizing the growing sense of frustration and futility in my chest.

It didn’t used to be like this.

I love reading, and even an article feels out of reach these days. Although I work in a field where my uninterrupted presence is the foundational requirement, I spend much of the rest of my time training my attention span out of existence. A YouTube video on the drive home, a quick scan of some reels over lunch, scrolling Reddit between clients to settle my nervous system.

Deep down we all know: this shit doesn’t make us feel better. It doesn’t improve our lives. In fact, it does the opposite. The attention economy has, in a generation, taken one of homo sapiens’ most beautiful, adaptive capacities (advanced cognitive functioning and sustained depth of attention) and rendered it, for most, a distant memory.

When I consider the word “attention,” it feels impossible to orient to it without turning toward my Buddhist training. Buddhist psychology, with all it’s seemingly complex lists and states of consciousness, really boils down to one central principle: What we give our attention to is what we become. Our sense of self is a rapid process of sensations made up of all the habits and patterns we unconsciously perform on a moment by moment basis, moving so quickly that it feels solid. What we repeatedly practice is who we are. Every time I scratch the itch of my craving mind, I become a less alive, less present, less human, human.

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows.

Wendell Berry

I recently came back from my first Zen sesshin - a seven day, highly structured meditation retreat. Unlike many of the other meditation retreats I’ve attended, Zen holds to its traditional form. Everything is regimented - where you sit, how you sit, when you eat, when you sleep, the chants and prayers that are recited. On the surface it can feel like the opposite of the freedom it promises. However, the genius of the structure is that it doesn’t leave any possibility of escaping from reality. Legs crossed, hands folded in the lap, staring at a wall in 35 minute chunks for 10 hours a day, participants aren’t even allowed to move until the bell rings.

Zen is just one of many traditions that support the human mind to see itself clearly. Sitting on a cushion as the sun comes up, the quiet of morning air filling the zendo, birds singing from the tree outside the window, it becomes obvious that the only thing keeping me from the peace of this pristine moment is my scattered mind. In this setting, its noise becomes painfully apparent, fantasies and grievances amplified against the ease of stillness.

With increasing frequency, my meditation practice (mostly in retreat settings) has been bringing me into contact with the fundamental truth of my life: It is quickly and undeniably ending.

This is exactly what meditation is designed to do. The practice is simple: Sit, find something real to focus on (the sensation of breath, a candle burning, the sounds in the room) and collect all of your attention on that object. And when the mind wanders into fantasy, bring it back to reality. Rinse and repeat.

As the retreat deepens and the practice painstakingly progresses, the mind begins to unpeel itself. When we consciously stop feeding our attention into the looping thought patterns comprising our self sense, they have no fuel to keep going. It’s like a ship cruising through the water that suddenly loses engine power - momentum will keep it going for a while but without propulsion, it will eventually come to a rest.

The mind has an existential interest in not letting this happen, because to the mind, this cessation is death. Without the constant attentional reinforcement of past and future, the mind is forced to contend with the terror of impermanence; life unfolding, transmuting, dying, and being reborn moment after moment, literally for (and as) eternity.

What Buddhism points to is the fact no self wants to face: our fantasies are not coming with us into that good night. The life we’re living now is the only life there is, and its quality is entirely, absolutely determined by how we use our attention.

I know there is another way to live.
When I find it, the angels
will cry out in rapture,
each cell of my body
will be a rose, a star.

Morgan Farley

The forces of power at work in our world are aware of the importance of attention. They have invested trillions of dollars into harnessing, siphoning, scattering, and dividing it because they understand that focused attention from a certain threshold of the population would render the “lives” we live in late stage capitalism intolerable, and revolution would shortly follow.

The technology that drives our society intentionally utilizes the most powerful hypnotic techniques ever devised to keep us treading water on the surface of consciousness. Bouncing from one stimulus to the next, we float along in the default of “consensus” reality, which is actually a self-reinforcing hallucination we spend our days talking ourselves and each other back into. In this state of being, we have no access to our power, our clarity, our gifts, our sensitivities, our love for life and the larger body of the earth. The emptiness of these false promises lives in the soma like an itch just out of reach, and short of contemplative training or other consciousness-expanding activity, the mind knows no other solution than to keep scratching in the places as it can access.

This is why death is the greatest and most important teacher. Death is the one thing the mind can’t rationalize, can’t ultimately distract itself away from. Mortality is the single grace that might have a shot at cracking the facade of post-modernity’s delusions and give continued human life on earth a chance. When we honestly reckon with our death and what it means on a somatic, intuitive level, only then do we encounter the urgency necessary to confront our benumbed inertia and complacency.

Real spirituality places death at the center. Monks are often required to spend time in the “charnal grounds,” watching human bodies burn en masse, or to spend time in the forest unprotected, submitting themselves to the forces of the earth. Ayahuasca, the entheogenic plant medicine of the Amazon, is also known as the “vine of death” because of its tendency to confront its drinkers with their own death early in their initiation. The Stoics coined the phrase “momento mori,” translated as “remember, you will die.” It’s a wild paradox that we can only be as alive as we are willing to know we’ll be dead, and yet, this is the way it is.

And so long as you have not experienced
this: to die and so to grow
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

Goethe

No matter the times we live in, we all have but a brief window to dance through this dimension. In this time particularly, our very society has become a charnal ground. Daily, we witness atrocities, rhetoric, corporate and policy decisions that even a decade ago would have been inconceivable. We’re witnessing the death of our paradigm in real time, and the scattering of our attention makes it hard to recognize that fact. The horror our deep selves feel is masked by the distraction and gradual normalization of tyranny.

But this is not the end of the story. Recognizing the game is not far away. In fact, it’s all right here, right now. The choice to focus, to deepen is both maddeningly simple and achingly difficult. It requires discomfort and courage and intention. But more than that, it requires the urgency that can only be born in the face of death. There is a specific number of breaths you will breathe in this lifetime. Google says it’s between 600 and 700 million. As a 36 year old, I’m probably already at 200 million. I’ve spent a couple thousand more at least in the writing of this article.

I started this piece with another iteration of the recognition of how much distraction I experience in my own life. More and more, I’m trying to recognize those moments and bring myself back to what is vital. I am going to die, and in the light of that, I feel the remorse living in my belly of all the squandered moments and my unconscious complicity with the dark agendas of people who do not feel the gift of their aliveness.

I do not yet know if I will have children, but I feel the voices of all those children existing today, and all who are yet to be born imploring me to wake up; wake up to the preciousness of this life, the sanctity of this fleeting opportunity to be sentient conduit of the universe in service of life.

To end with a prayer: May we let the death showing itself to us through our phones be more than a distraction. May we feel the truth of the ending of this chapter of human history deep in our bodies and have the courage to reclaim our birthrite of aliveness and may our aliveness breed more aliveness for the future generations. May we find the courage to wake up.