Throughout our lives, we all experience things that dismantle our worlds and make us feel as utterly minuscule as we truly are. Think back to your first broken heart, the first time you lost a family member, or when your beloved childhood pet died. You had never experienced blows like these, they were brand new to your ego. Whatever your first mini-death was, something in your heart died with this first great sorrow. To this day, you probably cannot pinpoint what that something was, but you know how much it hurt. What you probably also recall is how insignificant you felt. As your own suffering filled the rooms you moved through, life kept flowing. Television shows still played, dinners were still eaten, and new cars and shoes were still purchased. You may recall how people in your life continued to worry about trivial things and, out of politeness, you fought not to scream that whatever it was they were fretting over was small and meaningless compared to your new great pain.
You probably remember how nothing changed while your heart stood still. How everything seemed to happen in slow motion while you watched from within the distorted fishbowl of your overwhelming sadness. This feeling is so universal, it has been illustrated in film countless times, we can all visualize it. You may recollect the one day when the water was drained from your emotional fishbowl and your soul took the heartache, neatly folded it up and put it away. You remembered that you were not dead. And life resumed.
I call this pain the hungry ghost feeling. In Chinese Buddhism, hungry ghosts are the results of extremely unhappy or violent circumstances. These ghosts can also linger as a result of neglect by living ancestors. I have always pictured them wandering around lost, hands out, mouths speaking words that no one hears, moving through the world with the feeling of complete and utter dissatisfaction. In fact, when one has the hungry ghost feeling, I think the primary indication is that one is temporarily incapable of being satisfied. Usually, healing from these tiny deaths requires time. Sometimes other conditions must also be met.
The other kind of tiny death we experience happens at times when we do nearly die. Times when something happens and we narrowly escape death feel the inevitable weight and possibility of our own mortality. Most of us suspend thoughts of this fact so that we can live. But from time-to-time, we are reminded that our bodies, like the bodies of all of our ancestors, will return to dust.
I have had a number of these experiences. In 2004, I was traveling in Thailand with a group of friends. We were on a small island that had to be gotten to in a boat taxi. During the day, these taxis could come directly to the beach we were staying on. At night, however, if you wanted to take a taxi to another part of the island or leave the island altogether, you had to walk over large, dark rocky hills. I became ill with food poisoning. I was vomiting and unable to drink water for an entire day. After dark, I began to wonder if I was going to die in the poorly lit little beach cabin. I knew I was too weak to make it over the rocks and wondered how I would even get medical care if it was required. I went to sleep, and when I woke, news of the tsunami that killed more than 250,000 arrived. I had the feeling that death was everywhere and I would not escape it. The realization that my life would end became certain instead of abstract, for the first time. A few days later, we returned to Bangkok and in the early morning light I wandered through the city streets reading the names of hundreds and hundreds of posters for missing people. People from every corner of the world, lost in the water, dead in small waterlogged cabins, or buried under rubble.
These wee deaths of the ego are absolutely ubiquitous reminders of our relative size and importance in the universe. Knowing they are common to everyone does not make them easier, but moving through them does. Once you have endured one, you know you can withstand the next. Call it self-efficacy, strength, or experience, it does make the journey feel a little lighter knowing that the small death will kill something in you, but something else will fill the space and you will also learn something about how to live from it.
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