The Doctrine of Impermanence

One of the surprising side effects of a regular meditation practice is an increased awareness of all the "background noise" I used to tune out. This awareness exposes me to some things that might be categorized as For the Better and some that might seem like they belong in the For the Worse category. The good news is that my practice has also increased my base-line equanimity exponentially, so I find that most of the new input seems to falls into the "equal to" category.

One experiential field that has expanded a great deal is my ability to hear and interpret musical lyrics. As a result, songs I've heard hundreds and thousands of times before and given little or no thought to, have opened up as vast new territories of exploration. This past weekend, while driving down the Long Beach freeway with my partner, who is an avid car radio fan, I heard for the first time, all of the lyrics to the Semisonic song "Closing Time". If  you're a Buddhist and you're familiar with this song you might be able to guess where I'm headed with this...

I was pleasantly surprised to find an eloquent rendition of a line of thought common to Buddhist philosophy, in a song that I had previously dismissed as irredeemable pop tripe and a sugar coated homage to one-night-stands. The particular line reads: "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end". In a word, Anicca or Impermanence, one of Buddhisms Three Marks of Existence. The line stuck with me the way one hopes an important teaching from a traditional Sutta would and I'm not the least bit perturbed by this!

Today was the first day of my third week of school. For the next three years I will be moving towards a Masters in Divinity, with a focus in Buddhist Chaplaincy. After fifteen years of pondering the goal of going to graduate school I have finally arrived at this great big "new beginning". As a person who never made it through more than four months of High School, it feels like a rather significant turn of events. The goal of this blog, if there is just one, is to document this period change, this new beginning and the old beginnings end.