The Price of Being Alive
We trade a cardboard kingdom for a clock,
And call the restless bargain growing wise;
Then chase the child we buried in a box,
While little glowing screens reduce our eyes.
We sell the morning sunlight by the hour,
To buy a bigger room we never use;
We praise exhaustion as a form of power,
Then wonder why the soul begins to bruise.
A man in traffic dreams of being free,
A free man dreams of better traffic lanes;
We build a life around efficiency,
Then act surprised when nothing good remains.
We make our bodies carry all the cost,
For futures dressed in expensive clothes;
Then pay the doctor for the years we lost,
And ask why peace is hard to diagnose.
The wallet grows; the living room grows cold,
The calendar becomes a little god;
We buy what every commercial has sold,
Then feel our emptiness beneath the nod.
We worry over storms not yet in sight,
And miss the rain that blesses us today;
The mind rehearses every future night,
While life, unbothered, quietly walks away.
We call this planning, being safe, prepared,
As if control could make the grave decline;
But fear keeps every tender moment spared,
Behind a locked door marked: “Not yet. Not mine.”
We speak of death as if it’s bad for sales,
A rude old guest who should not call at all;
Yet every living thing leaves little trails,
And every giant learns that he is small.
The irony is almost hard to miss:
We chase a life too frightened to be lived;
We pass the cup, suspicious of the kiss,
Then curse the world for what it never gave.
Perhaps the child was not so blind or weak;
He knew a day could be a universe;
He cried when hurt, said what he meant to speak,
And did not turn each wanting to a curse.
So keep your money, but do not become
A servant to the things that money buys;
Make room for grief, for laughter, for the sun,
For one true face that looks into your eyes.
We rush from childhood, spend our health for gold,
Then fear tomorrow till today has fled;
But life is here: be present, brave, and whole—
We die once; do not practice being dead.
…
DCG
What surprises me most about humankind is that we get bored of our childhood, rush to grow up, and long to be children again. That we lose our health to make money and then lose our money to restore our health. That by thinking anxiously about the future, we forget the present, such that we live in neither the present nor the future. That we live as if we’ll never die, and die as though we’ve never lived.
— “What surprises me most about humankind…” — source unverified; commonly attributed to the Dalai Lama
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