Just Like That

“Isn’t it funny” she said, “how we can just end one life and begin another, just like that?”

Yes, so funny, I thought, as we drove down the mountain towards the temple. Our program had already started to feel like a lifetime ago. We drove through the market where we had first arrived almost five weeks before. It was an odd sensation, some strange ambiguous feeling of seeing this place for what felt like the first time and somehow still knowing it by heart. The men sitting in the street, the women balancing a baby in one arm and a myriad of produce in the other, the children running and screaming down the dirt path. We floated through it, just as I had in all my dreams of home, both distant and familiar.

A lifetime ago. But then, isn’t every moment a new life unto itself? Am I not a different person now than I ever have been before or ever will be again? Do I not die and become reborn a million times a day?

I sat outside the temple. A new life began. I wrote frantically, my body so full of thought and emotion that I felt as though if my pen were to stop, my mind and heart would too. Below a sea of monks in maroon colored robes filled the courtyard, and then, just like that, seemed to vanish. Another lifetime gone. Memory plays beautiful tricks on the mind.

I moved inside. A fly wandered across the enormous marble floor. I wondered if he knew where he was, if he realized he was in a holy and spiritual place, if he was aware of this grand moment in his life. I wondered if he was better for having come here too.

He flew away as my friend’s knees hit the floor. Another lifetime gone. I watched my friend do his prostrations, up and down in prayer. I don’t know what a prayer is, but I do know what it feels like to watch someone pray. I know what it feels like to be in the presence of such peace. In silence I watched his pressed hands move from head to chin to chest to floor. I watched him rise and fall again and again, the ebbing tide of a life condensed. His faith resonated ubiquitously.

I watched it spread through the hot Indian air, so heavy with scent and sentiment, that to simply breathe became a prayer unto itself. Inhale the life that is just now beginning. Exhale the disappointments of the life now gone. Each breath it’s own preface and epilogue. Each cycle it’s own birth and death. Each moment it’s own lifetime, coming and going, rising and falling. The air lay bittersweet upon my tongue.

Something new was already beginning within me. Another lifetime gone. I looked outside to see her propped up against a pillar in her little white tunic. She looked like a rag doll I might have had in my youth, a lifetime ago, when foreign countries were under the kitchen table and couch cushions were walls for forts. She looked so wide-eyed and awake, and yet, as though her mind had already drifted from this time and place to somewhere else, somewhere new. Just like that.

The large gong sounded and the monks began to shuffle in for their midday prayer. Their chanting twisted and turned in the thickening air, mixing with every thought and hope and prayer ever sent out into it. Something wonderful was being created. A new lifetime was being formed. Another lifetime gone.

And just like that, we ended and began.