17. Doing Not Being

I run my hand over the grass and I feel the texture of the individual blades — their sharp, freshly-cut edges tickling the skin of my palm. This is a singular experience. I am touching this particular patch of grass at this particular time with this particular hand. This has never been done and it will not be done again. Not here, not now, not by me.

I bring my hands into my lap and close my eyes. I am seated on the grass. I can feel it pressing against my bare legs. I let the feeling go, so that it becomes one with the ordinary condition of my body. I ignore everything I can hear or smell, everything outside of me. I am the singular experience now. What is it to be me, in the absence of the external world? What is it to have this particular body? I am alive, I know, but what is it to be alive?

I take a deep breath and try to feel the whole truth of my existence. I examine myself and my present condition, but there is nothing for me to grasp. In the absence of doing anything, of feeling anything, of thinking anything, there seems to be nothing that is me. I am a completely empty being. Beyond these churning thoughts seeking and imagining and groping for some presence to latch onto, there is nothing I can see.

Then I start to feel something in the heart of the empty cavern that is me. But when I attend to it, I see it is nothing but my own reaction to the realization of my emptiness. It is a kind of concern, or perhaps despair. It is the worry that I ought to be something but I am not. I feel there should be something that is me — even in the absence of the world — but I cannot find it.

But of course I am also something. I am the one having these thoughts. I am something and I am nothing at the same time.

I open my eyes and run my hand over the grass again.

The ticklish, whiskery sensation of the grass remains the same, but there is a new depth to the experience. I notice now that, in the moment of action, I become more real, more substantial. There is an experience of the world and it is me who lives it. I am the experiencing. I become something by doing something.

It is the doing that matters, not the being.

Perhaps it was the doing all along.