Rhythm

Coming home from work tonight, I saw that the patio was once again covered with leaves, and will need a good leaf blowing this weekend. It seems that I've had to use the leaf blower every weekend since I've moved here, many weekends to clean up after hurricanes or thunderstorms, other weekends just because it needed to be done. But I've come to enjoy the regularity of firing up the leaf blower, pulling the cord and hearing the engine cough to life, just like the weekend before, and like the weekend before that, and the weekend before that.

Autumn is definitely here. The color of the leaves is already starting to change, and the leaves that are dropping on the patio are now dry and brown, not the green twigs and leaves that fell following the hurricanes and thunderstorms. It's actually kind of amazing to me that the seasons actually do change, and just like the repetition of the weekly leaf blowing, I appreciate the rhythm of the changing seasons.

All the time, there's all kinds of rhythms going around on all kinds of frequencies and cycles: quick, short-interval rhythms like my breathing and the beating of my heart, to daily rhythms like hunger-eating-defecating, and weekly rhythms like the leaf blowing, opening the zendo on Monday nights, filling out time sheets on Fridays. Women are also intimately tied to the monthly rhythm of the lunar cycles, which is probably part of the reason why women often seem to be more in tune with their bodies than men, who have to leap from their short-cycle biological rhythms all the way out to the annual rhythms of the changing season.

As I live longer, I start to see even longer-frequency rhythms, like whole generations rising from infancy and growing and producing new generations of their own. I also see population change as suburbs, even cities, spring up where I remember open space and green trees. If I look hard enough, I can probably even see climate change in eroding beaches, now-dry creeks, and retreating glaciers.

These rhythms create patterns, and in patterns there is energy. Breaking patterns releases energy - from the block-busting bursts of energy released when the patterns of an atom are broken by fission or fusion, to the life-enhancing energy experienced when we break the pattern of our daily routines and do something new.

But it's easy to get caught up in these patterns and rhythms, though, and not even realize it, and then have your entire life pass quickly before you in 4/4 time before you even know it. I am now 50 years old and, not to sound too morbid about it, realize that soon I will be dead. In 20 years I will be 70. 20 years may sound like a long time to some, but as I look back to 1984, it doesn't seem like that long ago, and in the same amount of time as 1984 until now, I will be 70. Worse still, time goes faster with the passing years - the tempo of these rhythms increases with every year (is it almost Halloween again?). If 30 to 50 passed like one long breath, I will be 70 in the blinking of an eye.

Please don't get me wrong - being 70 is not all that terrible. As they say, it's better than the alternative. My mother came down and visited me this summer and she is now 70, and still working gainfully, sharp and aware, and still very alive and vibrant. But if 50 to 70 is but a blinking of an eye, 70 to 90 will be a nanosecond, and after 90, let's face it, I will be dead.

So, as the Zen Masters ask, since death itself is certain, what will you do with your life? And since death itself is certain but the time of death is uncertain, what will you do with this day? With this moment?

Somehow "shopping" doesn't seem like the appropriate response.

But meanwhile, I can just sit and listen to all of these rhythms play themselves out - the rhythms of my body, the rhythms of our society, the rhythms of the seasons and our planet. And realize that this thing that I call "myself" is but a single beat in a larger rhythm, a single note in a symphony if you will, and by increasing my awareness of the entire suite ("the music of the spheres" comes to mind) I can lose myself, literally, in these rhythms. You may not like the way this music ends, but you have to admit it's got a great beat and you can dance to it.