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Hello and Happy Beginnings! It’s good to enter 2024 with all of you. Time, we know, is relative, and so is its marking, but transitional moments like the turning of one year to the next are useful because they foreground change, and with it, the promise of the previously unthought, the unimagined. Beginnings open up our minds to possibility, nudging us past our anxiety about the unknown into the excitement and potential of the unexpected. That is their power.
But it does take courage to begin. It takes determination to do it over and over again. A life well lived requires both, given how tightly impermanence is woven into its fabric. Nothing lasts for long, which means we’re always having to adjust to new circumstances. We’re always having to reinvent ourselves. My teacher used to say that life is a constant process of becoming. He meant we’re never done being who we are. We never arrive at our destination—the apex of our life, our love, our labor—because the destination shifts as we travel, as in Zeno’s paradox.
Zeno of Elea was the Greek philosopher Parmenides’ student, who believed that reality is one—a single whole—and therefore space and time and motion are all illusions. (How can you speak of traveling from one place to another, from then to now, when you and the place you’re starting from and the place you’re getting to and the time it takes to get there are one and the same thing?) To prove Parmenides’ point, Zeno came up with a series of paradoxes, the best known that of Achilles and the tortoise.
Achilles, the quick-footed hero of the Trojan war, faces a tortoise in a race. The tortoise is given a head start when the two begin running, but no one doubts that Achilles will quickly overtake it. Except there’s a problem. To pass the tortoise Achilles first has to get to the place where the tortoise started, but when he gets there, the tortoise will have moved ahead. Again Achilles has to catch up with it, and though the distance will have gotten shorter given their different speeds, by the time Achilles reaches the place where the tortoise was, the tortoise will have advanced a tiny bit again. The gap between the two keeps getting smaller and smaller—Achilles runs half the distance between him and the tortoise, then that distance is reduced to a quarter of its length, an eighth, a sixteenth—but never closes completely.
(There’s a nice parallel in the story of Angulimala and the Buddha. Angulimala, the murderer, had made a horrific pact to kill 1,000 people and make a garland of their fingers—Angulimala meals “Garland of Fingers”—and seeing the Buddha in the distance, resolved to make him his last victim. But no matter how fast Angulimala ran, he couldn’t overtake the master, who calmly walked on. In a rage, Angulimala yelled, “Stop, monk! Stop!” “I have stopped, Angulimala,” said the Buddha gently. “It’s you who hasn’t stopped.” And in that instant, the not-so-ordinary instant, everything changed. Angulimala woke up from his nightmare and, seeing what he’d done, begged the Buddha to ordain him.)
Many years after Zeno, mathematicians came up with a solution to his paradox using the concept of limits, but the philosopher’s point was that we can’t ever arrive because the getting there goes on infinitely. And further, that getting there isn’t really getting anywhere since we don’t really move from one point to the next. There are just discrete moments that, happening one after another, give us the illusion of continuity, like a film strip made up of distinct picture frames. Or, to use another one of Zenos’ paradoxes, like an arrow that doesn’t move through space but instead occupies an arrow-sized space in every instant, not traveling from here to there but just being. And being. And being. In Zen we’d say that at any given moment, the arrow occupies all of space and time. There’s only that arrow filling the entire universe, and nothing else.
These may seem like quaint thought experiments or plain old abstractions, but the fact is that they paint an accurate picture of reality. More importantly, they offer us useful tools to live well and freely.
If neither Achilles nor the arrow move from one point to the next, if they never get to their destination, then we can say that there are no real beginnings, only moments following one after another without start or end. But we can also derive a more interesting conclusion from what Zeno and Zen and now physics have been trying to tell us: every single moment presents us with an opportunity to begin anew because every moment is new—and is all there is. There’s no other time but now, this unassuming, unheralded moment.
Beginnings are useful, and they happen all the time. We don’t have to wait until the New Year, or the death of a loved one, or the loss of our health or our livelihood to decide that this is the moment we’ll relinquish the old to make way for the new. In every instant we live and we die and we live again. Every instant is a rebirthing. Moreover, every moment, having no boundary, no beginning or end, contains the entirety of our history and all possibilities for our future. This means that in every single moment, everything could—and does—change.
Joan Didion famously wrote, “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” Our task is to be awake when it comes, and make the most of it.
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