Today is not guaranteed

A meditation on life and death

The meditation is simple: wake up, say the words, contemplate them before you rise. Today is not guaranteed. I read that this is how monks begin their days — with death consciousness. It is supposed to be the surest path to presence and gratitude.

The day after a new moon. A good day, an auspicious day, for new beginnings. So I decide to try the meditation practice. I will say the words, first thing in the morning.

Today is not guaranteed.

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Day one begins — when, exactly? At 1 a.m., when N calls for me minutes after I’ve finally fallen asleep? At 4 a.m., when she wakes again to nurse? It is a ritual that usually knocks her out in minutes, but today she drinks and drinks and drinks from me, but cannot sleep. She drinks and plays and drinks and sings and talks her endearing gibberish, her mouth full of new teeth wrapped around my sore elastic nipples, until I nearly carry out my threat of putting her in the crib in the next room. I don’t. She finally falls asleep against me.

I will declare: the day begins when I open my eyes and decide to get out of bed.

And there the words are, almost before I intend them — Today is not guaranteed.

Am I doing it right? What is supposed to happen next? Is this where gratitude rushes in? Is this where I feel suddenly awake to the miracle of being alive?

I roll out of bed and N dashes out of the bedroom into the kitchen. Nothing feels different. But the curious thing is that the words don’t stay etched in that single moment of contemplation. They spread. They stretch out as I move through the day, like not enough butter over a wide slice of bread. They are running beneath everything, a liminal consciousness, a quiet observer of my day : today is not guaranteed, today is not guaranteed.

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N is happy and sticky. She has procured a tube of condensed milk, opened it, and applied it in improbable places. Now she climbs the swiveling dining chairs to climb the table, to reach the salt shaker, to salt the entire world. Or as much of it as a few tablespoons allow.

She climbs everything now: tables, railings, stairs, walls. I am living the cliché about motherhood. Every moment is wonder at her resilience and terror at the world’s capacity to hurt her. She is my heart outside my body. To parent her without dissolving into constant anxiety requires an unreasonable amount of faith that I renew a thousand times a day: faith in myself, in her, in the world. A thousand times a day I stop myself from sprinting to her. I let her fall. I watch her dust herself off and continue.

I let her put in her mouth paper, crayons, lint, food from the ground, bathwater, baby toothpaste, coconut oil, ghee, the salt she has triumphantly spilled. I no longer stop her from climbing the slide in the park that is too big for her. It is the one with metal steps and a seven-foot drop. For two months I have hovered and created distractions and said no. Today she is sixteen months old and grasping the rails with her tiny hands and pulling herself up like a mountaineer. The other adults watch us with undisguised judgment. I keep my tense arms at my sides. I stay close. I swallow my fear and gently remind her to pay attention.

It is on the walk back from the park that she falls, unprovoked, on flat ground, and bites through the inside of her lip. There is blood – sudden, bright, too much of it. She screams and I carry her home, wipe her face, press an ice cube into her mouth. I search frantically through her first aid kit for something that might help. I find a teething ointment, still sealed. I bring it to her and ask her to show me the ouchie.

She doesn’t offer me her mouth. Instead she offers me the crook of her elbow. It is an old scrape, healed weeks ago, barely a mark now. The first time I’d seen it, the blood had barely dried, and I had kissed it. She remembered. She has pointed it out every few days since, and I have kissed it every time.

So I do it now again. I bend awkwardly low, press my face to the hollow in her arm, feel the small warmth of her skin on my lips. My head presses against her tiny ribcage, and I breathe in her scent of salt and sunshine. She smiles wide, unmindful of her bruised, bloody lip.

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It is the end of the day and I sit in the swing on the balcony and do nothing. A fluorescent blimp bobs in the distance against a skyline crowded with half-built towers. There are too many empty buildings in this city. Thousands of dark unoccupied windows. Empty holes where homes should be. I can’t explain why they unsettle me. They look like dead bodies, an army of them, a field of them.

There is loud and insistent music whose location is impossible to determine. Someone is celebrating. There is always someone celebrating. A birthday, a first blood, an engagement, a birth. Gods and saints, anniversaries of ancient victories. Most nights loud music blares from several directions at once, a competition of joy, dholak drums and shrill trumpets and Bollywood DJ mixes pushing through closed doors and white noise machines, because the city is crowded and festive and there is apparently no place for happiness to go except outward, with loudspeakers, late into the night.

N sleeps through it all every night.

Tonight too, N is asleep. S plays his guitar in the room behind me. I watch him through the doorway, head bent over the instrument, face turned away. His fingers find a tune that sounds like raindrops pattering on a lake, and then it turns pensive. He hasn’t played in a while, and it shows – there is a slight suspicion in his fingers on the string, a minute hesitation in the timing. Somehow this makes the music more poignant, like a pause before a kiss.

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I am here and only here. It is a moment and also an eternity. I am a blip in the duration of the expansion of creation, a dot in the universe. This is all I get. And it is so much — too much.

We are born with death written into us, and not one of us knows how long we have. It is a heavy weight to live with, so we forget. We have to forget, a little, to keep living. But when we forget death, life becomes small. And that is so much worse.

So this is the price. I must live in anticipation of loss, in full knowledge of its inevitability and its irrevocability. The sweetness is inseparable from the sorrow.

Today is not guaranteed. I said the words this morning, first thing, before I rose.

I think I am doing it right.