So big and so small. Bigness and tininess, wonder and awe, what we can know and what we can't. Everyone thinks about those things sometimes. But these kinds of thoughts are actually always somewhere in the back of people's minds, not articulated but affecting everything they do, just like the thought of not being here one day. There are ways to transform them into something that brings calm and some peace, sometimes even joy or bliss. To try to just force them out of your mind doesn't really work, since the tension remains just below the surface. And to say these questions just don't matter and are just midnight, college-dorm-discussion stuff doesn't really work either, and is being kind of dishonest with yourself too, because your mind still goes there. So just dismissing it is a kind of "religious" act of faith in your ability to control what's around you, which obviously is not possible in any real way.
Yet still, you definitely can live with those questions and feelings, accepting them as always present just below the surface, and also function in and experience your everyday life with pleasure. It's simply not fighting the questions at all. Accept them. Let the awe and fear of being a tiny thing just wash over you. In the end, you can't control a thing. You were born. You experience pleasure, pain, joy, sorrow, contentment, fear, over the course of your life. Then you die. You absolutely should make the best of your little time on earth, but how can you if you're enjoyment depends on always pushing those thoughts out of your mind? You can't kid yourself by always turning away, trying to make them feel like distant abstractions. They are not, and everyone know that. Teenage rumination and melancholy is so common it's given rise to a bunch of clichés and stereotypes. So youth does not protect your from these thoughts. They are there pretty much from the time you learn to think. If you feel them, thinking routinely about your essential powerlessness in the end, that's when you can start to enjoy life without those always just below-the-surface tensions.
Think of those school and office exercises of falling back and trusting that the others in your group will catch you. That trust exercise has become another cliché, and like most clichés it's superficially true. You have to trust, though, not so much in people as in the rightness of the bigger things around you. That feeling, as you try to cultivate it, definitely starts to occupy more and more of your mental state over the day. It's like an image in the mind of floating in a warm sea, having given up every attempt to fight it or even swim by your tiny power against the sea, yet trusting it as completely as a person can accept loss of control. All that really takes is feeling things from the perspective of "ahimsa." The key is to be completely self-absorbed in your desire to be happy in a deep way, but honest with yourself about yourself always. If you get this feeling slowly and then more, it just comes with a feeling of identification with others: people, animals, things. By being utterly self-absorbed in this way you also become other-absorbed, because it just starts to automatically feel like others are kind of an extension of you. And you won't easily turn against yourself just to avoid pain. It's not possible to really explain these states, but you of course already know what they are, either from childhood memories, happy-occasion memories, dreams or even vestigial memories from when you were in the womb. Benign morals, traditions, schooling, etc. reinforces that, but more and more as there is little community or patience, you can't trust in formal structures so much. But you can try to really feel your half-buried ground state, like the feeling of a child who feels safe and secure, and try to keep it as a feeling below the surface when you're engaged in every day life. That's it, and that's too hard, but it's not so hard in little steps, where success or failure is not a big deal because the emotional investment with each step is small. It all comes back full circle and so complete.
— Gabriel Fenteany, October 16, 2015
