Hello friends,
how’s today going? Today for me is like there aren’t enough hours in a day after my morning practices to do all the things I want to do. It’s like what Dr John De Martini talks about when you’re so aligned to your purpose you can go on for hours. I have to tell myself, “Hey, hello, go to bed.” You know very well, right? We, humans, are creatures of habits, now to change a habit in itself is one thing and then we go and make a new habit of it. Not necessarily bad for us.
This article comes from me writing this topic down some couple months back. One afternoon me, my mum and dad were meditating. Many days before that my mum kept telling me this sentence, “Old age is no good.” This one specific day I wanted answers, exact answers of why “Old age is no good,” what she really means, and I wanted my seventy-eight-year-old father to elaborate what old age is really like.
After my mother’s discussion on why she thought old is no good helped me understand that her point of view came from a consequential angle. After talking to my father on his understanding of “Old age is no good,” many things came up. My father is not a big talker and all he said was five words. Everything happens in a second, and so I dug deeper, “What’s everything happens in a second, like what do you mean?” I asked him.
Pay attention, this was his answer.
“When you breathe in and you breathe out the breath is gone. It all happened in a second.” I really wanted to say the “s**t” word here, because I had some epiphanies. Like wow! Did the above sentence give you an epiphany? Let’s go deeper. This is what he meant, I took the words right out of his mouth and made him explain if that is what he meant or what did he really mean.
Explanation
Okay, so what in the material world you know that can do what any living thing does? Do you know a machine that has the dynamics of what a human body/or the body of a living organism has? Let’s take an engine of a car or anything that is a mode of transport as an example. You need fuel or electricity to run a car. You need to have water and engine oil too and all the parts of the car are keeping it together for it to fulfil its purpose.
Even a car is not as fast as a human, no engine’s dynamics is close to any living species where it can do what the body does with one breath of air going in and out. Not only in the physical dynamics of just one breath but as well as the internal dynamics.
Just going off the article in the link below, this is exactly what it states:
When you breathe, you absorb oxygen from the air. You also get rid of carbon dioxide, a gas that’s produced when your body’s cells use up oxygen. This exchange takes place in your lungs, two sponge-like organs in your chest.
- When you take a breath in, air flows down your throat and windpipe (trachea).
- From the trachea, air flows into two large, tubular airways (bronchial tubes). The bronchial tubes branch as they extend into your lungs.
- From the bronchial tubes, air goes deeper into the lungs through smaller and smaller branches. These smaller airways are called bronchioles.
- At the end of this maze of little branches are tiny air sacs called alveoli. These sacs take oxygen from the air you breathe and pass it into your bloodstream. They also collect carbon dioxide from the bloodstream for you to breathe out.
- When you breathe out, air—now carrying carbon dioxide—travels out of your lungs the way it came in. (The article to reference the above points)
All this just happened with one breath in and one breath out. I don’t believe that even a car can function this quick from the minute you put the ignition on and let’s not forget it requires power/fuel to run.
The Epiphanies
Epiphany number 1 of “Everything happens in a second”
I got my father to explain further after he said those five words. He said the breath goes in and out, everything happens in the second and the breath is gone. Between the lines I saw this:
The breath is gone, you can’t bring those very molecules of gas back. Oxygen is a gas. You can’t bring the moments lived, the day back, the moment back, the same replicated feeling ever back, nothing, in the world of the living what has left does not repeat the same way ever in terms of experience. The action of breathing continues like the small hand of the clock until there is no more time left.
Personally, I believe that we’ve been (each of us depending on our destiny) given a number of breaths to live in the current lifetime and the breath in the human body is the small hand of a clock ticking as time goes on.
The breath went just as quick as it came. ?
Epiphany number 2 of “Everything happens in a second”
Something happened overnight and I returned the next morning still pondering on the “everything happens in a second” and during lunch, this is the answer that came to me to give to my parents especially my mother whose perception of old age is no good that was based on the consequential angle. Not that they needed an answer or anything, but it certainly reminded me of something.
One winter’s day in Madrid, I was walking from the shops (with you know who, no not Voldemort. If you’ve been reading my articles then you’ll know who) and walking back, not sure to where, but we walked at a medium pace. As I walked a massive branch missed me and it just happened to slightly knock itself lightly against my head and shoulders until it fell to the ground. Obviously realising it was something big because it did give me a nudge we stopped to turn and found a massive piece of a branch of a tree landing down at that moment when I passed. I remember how shocked I was when I turned around, saw that massive piece of wood fall to the ground and go “Thump!” The city council workers were busy trimming the trees days before and have somehow missed finishing the job properly with this one. I even remembered thinking, “Lucky it was me and lucky it happened the way it did,” aware of the old and vulnerable who walk to the shops. I also remembered the fear that filled me with how sudden things can happen in life and I remember even thinking, “everything happens in a second.” I have quite a handful of stories like this like once I decided to take a shower out of my normal routine and then fifteen/twenty minutes after coming out, the bathroom ceiling fell into the tub. This is how it looked.
Which is why I realised the importance of this conversation that I needed to have with my parents. As we ate lunch, I told my parents the story of an old man who died in a flat, hardly went out and left his savings to someone. I told my parents that they shouldn’t fear death because “everything happens in a second.” Just like one of the articles where I wrote about women/mothers who shouldn’t be teaching their girls to dream all their lives about their wedding day but more so about what married/unmarried life entails.
One could forever be afraid of how they’re going to die at old age, there are so many possibilities. You could have recovered from cancer a week ago and a week after a massive chunk of a tree might hit you. Just like the minute you take a breath of air in and out everything happens in a second the same can be said of death.
I told my parents to live their life fearlessly because no one knows how they’re going to die. When death comes it doesn’t announce itself, just like when you’re going to be told you are going to get the job of your dreams you might have some kind of a hunch or something but it’s not a done deal until it happens. Just like that, I said, it will happen in a second, just like the time when once some years ago my mum caught her finger in the grinder, it all happened in a second.
The minute the actual thing hits you to the moment you see the blood oozing out of you it all happens in a second, and it’s nothing to fear, it might not even be a bloody mess, it might not even be your time, but you can’t sit there doing nothing, not living a wonderful life and all your life waiting for death to show up nicely. So maybe we need to teach our parents that they shouldn’t be fearing all their lives about how they’re going to die when all that time fearing is time lost in living a wonderful life, just like parents should be teaching their girls that they shouldn’t be dreaming all their lives about their wedding day, they should be teaching them to dream about their lives, or what they want their married/unmarried life to look like – T. Dench Patel, 5 August 2020, 17:26
Epiphany 3 of “Everything happens in one second”
The minute my father told me about these five words, I realised that holding onto an angry moment for too long is not doing the body, mind and soul any justice, and neither is it doing any justice for those externally even the energy it sends out as long as you hold onto something. Just like what made you angry happened in just one second, including the physical and chemical reactions that occur in the body when one gets angry the same way it should be gone in a second or when it possibly can as quickly as it possibly can leaving your spirit. As long as it stays in you it’s doing you harm and breathing is a wise thing, we do it subconsciously but it’s presence when you notice is really saying, “Let go”, all the time, “Let it go. Keep the parts of it that do good and once done let off all the toxic things of that moment that doesn’t serve you, leave, let it be gone.” – T. Dench Patel, 5 August 2020,17:39
So, see, why how you look at life can either make everything possible or everything impossible in just one second.
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
P.S With Epiphany number 2 – In times of Corona I really wish the old and vulnerable well, it’s a tough call right now.
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