What do people want? What are any of us actually, fundamentally, looking for in all the various things we are looking for? We all are, and yet we remain unconvinced that we are, or that we are enough. Regardless of how much we augment our being with our immense doing, in an effort to construct an abiding and secure identity, we remain unsure. Even the greatest of us know, in the middle of the night, when the moment is most tender, that we are all like clouds, like grass, springing up and dying back when winter comes. Somehow, despite all the various accomplishments, both inner and outer, of a lifetime, none of us can escape the fact that we are less and less day by day, as time runs on. Whether or not we think about this we all know it. The most basic fact of our lives — our very existence, our very sense of identity — is elusive, constantly sliding away.

It was the genius of the Buddha to pinpoint this abiding human problem and to apply gentle acupressure right at the heart of it. The Buddha felt that since what we hold to as identity, our fixed sense of being a person, is so unreliable (as we always knew, always feared), we should stop insisting on it with such shrillness. Rather than trying to avoid the reality of not being someone, Buddha thought that we should observe and embrace this fact. There is no real identity outside of flux, he taught. If we practice and train in this existential fact, which we verify with meditation experience, then we have nothing to fear. As we begin to warm up to life in this way, with openness to the endless change within and outside us, we come to see the effort to maintain a brittle sense of identity as cold, even frozen. We come to appreciate that the whole point of spiritual practice is to warm up, to become flexible with what we think we are and begin to release ourselves to our experience as it really is. This warmth melts the ice of identity and lets the waters of our lifetime flow.

— Zoketsu Norman Fischer

[via whiskey river]