First Day of Lent

I've been thinking about posterity lately. Appropriate for Lent, which is a season of recalling our mortality, our status as finite creatures with a beginning and an end.

First I heard the news that Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan has promised to rebuild at least one of the two statues of the Buddha carved into a cliff that the Taliban destroyed in March 2001. The destruction was a stupid act of cultural and religious vandlaism. But I find the plan to rebuild them foolish, and very un-Buddhist. Karzai has secured a sculptor, but no money for the project. If money is found I can think of many better uses.

Then I read a story in the February 12 issue of the New Yorker called "A Tranquil Star" by Primo Levi. A beautiful story. It includes an image of an exploding star engulfing a small planet and how everything ever made or thought or felt on the planet, every product of art, or thought, or science, and works of nature too, accumulated over millions of years is vaporized in a matter of minutes.

So I thought, then, of my own work. And I've been thinking how quickly the world is changing today, and how little there really is any chance that anyone would care about my words in a generation or two. The thought doesn't depress me. It makes me smile a little actually.

How precious is this moment. It's enough to say something beautiful, or share an intersting thought, or express compassion right now, and just for right now. That's all we have, but it's more than enough. It's everything. It's plenty.