In his book The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz , writes about “surrendering to the angel of death". By this he means accepting the impermanence of everything, e.g. our cars, our pets, our jobs, our health, our partner. Nothing really ever belongs to us. It’s all on loan and death can take it at any time. As a friend recently said to me, "There are no luggage rack on a hearse." Yet we all go through life acting as though things will go on as they always have. Then we are shocked and angered when doesn’t. Ow, you say, why do I want to think about that? Let me enjoy my happy ignorance while it lasts. Well, maybe it’s not so happy. A lot of thought and energy is wasted every day on resistance to change -- both the big changes like losing a partner all the way down to the little ones, like a co-worker suddenly snapping at you at the office.
Our tendency to see things as constant or permanent is a trick of the mind, our ability to remember things and hold them in our thoughts. This is all well and good and even useful until our memory latches on to something unpleasant. Then we can be stuck in our pain for a long time as we play the memory over and over again. We live in our unhappy past while life moves on. The Iranian film, Willow Tree by Majid Majidi, provides a sobering illustration of this trap. In the film, a middle-aged man, blinded in a chance accident when he was a child, has his sight restored by an operation. In the beginning he is so happy as he watches with ecstasy the progress of an ant on his windowsill in the hospital. But very soon his new sight fills him with disappointments. He discovers that his wife is not as beautiful as other women, that his home is not so luxurious as his uncles, that his scholastic achievements as a blind man are insignificant compared to what he might have done had he not been blind. He becomes more and more miserable, trapped in the past of what might have been. As fate would have it, he loses his sight again.
Surrendering to the angel of death inoculates us against the negative habits of memory by teaching us acceptance, even appreciation of what is. I have been trying to work on this in small ways. Like surrendering to the inevitable and never-ending disappointments of traffic – someone driving too slow in front of me, just missing the green at a light that stays red too long, being cut off by a car that didn’t stop at its stop sign. It’s not as easy as it sounds. I am aware of speeding up as a car creeps by mine, so he won’t cut in front of me. It take major effort to lighten the weight of my foot on the gas pedal. But then I remember my dear friend, Marianne, who died last December to a nasty cancer at the age of 53. Traffic loses its importance and acceptance is a piece of cake.
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