Life is a River

Life is a River that runs through us. I was watching a DVD on TV of "Kundun". It is a very well done movie about the life from birth of the Dalai Lama and of his escape to India to form a Government in Exile there. I had seen this movie before but for the first time the sand paintings made sense to me. The whole movie is a meditation on impermanence which basically gives the feeling that only the Dalai Lama and a few others were actually adults in the whole movie. The rest were either wayward children or naive children and in a strange sort of way both were equally sad in contemplating.

By the end of the movie I saw clearly how life runs through us like a river and we each tend to be attached to either the river coming toward us or we get lost in the loss of the river traveling away from us, as in being very sad watching all the people we love and are attached to dying. If we get too lost in the loss it kills us young in mind, body and spirit(one, two or all three). On the other hand if we are only looking toward the future and don't learn at all from the past we become such extreme idealists that we completely lose pragmatism. However, by meditating upon the impermanence of the present, the past and the future one becomes more realistic and capable of dealing with all changes including ones own death. Reaching this equipose one can have peace and yet still be pragmatic and realistic as long as that one also has compassion for all beings including oneself in the past, present and future.