I turned 26 today

The day would’ve passed by rather unremarkably (did the world stop? No) had I not had a task that was specifically designed to send me down memory lane.

It just so happens that this weekend, my mother, my sister and I will be giving a talk at the Kechara Sunday Service about our journey in the Dharma. My mother asked me to look for old photos of myself and my siblings with Rinpoche to accompany our talk.

After scouring thousands of photos since the 1990s, I’ve come to a conclusion – I have led a pretty privileged 26 years.

I know that hindsight can have blinders, and you forget the bad memories because they’re never captured in photographs. But for all that I complain about in my life, I really shouldn’t. Yes things get difficult but those times in my life are interrupted by long spells of general contentment and everything’s-gonna-be-okay.

And it’s these moments that are captured in photographs. Looking at them, I want to go back to the moment captured in that photograph, to experience the sounds, the sights, the smells and the feeling of it once again.

But the trouble is, once I’m dead, all of these memories are meaningless. They’re precious to no one but me and the people in the pictures, and once THEY are all gone, the pictures become…irrelevant. Nothing but bits of ink printed onto scraps of paper.

So what’s a girl to do?

When I was in my late teens, I read a quote by Bruce Lee that has stuck with me forever – “The key to immortality is to live a life worth remembering”.

I think that’s what I’m going to do 🙂

birthday, reflection Personal, Reflections and Teachings