No one else I know of has this huge weight or this urgency. No one else in my previous class that I know of felt the stress that I did. It wasn’t anything objective, it wasn’t anything real, it was just me. Both of these things.

My eye wanders to the right, to my own self-description. Inevitable suicide. It’s not that simple anymore, but the word inevitable has never gone away. It’s always been there. Inevitable. I don’t want it to not be inevitable. Inevitable gives me strength, it eggs me forward.

And no, it has never gone away, it has been continuous. The suicide has been ongoing. What does that mean anymore? I know, but I don’t. It’s more, and it’s nothing.

The urgency is that I’m supposed to have died already, and I can’t figure out why I haven’t. The obvious is that I haven’t completed what I’m supposed to complete, but I’m at an utter loss at what it is now. I thought I’d finished everything. I feel I’ve learned all I need to learn, and the causes and conditions surrounding me don’t support the continuation of my learning.

Unless

My time at the monastery was made frivolous by my attachments and desire. If I went again, the next time I go, I’m not taking anything with me not practice related. No computer, no internet, no non-practice related music, no coffee, no bike. What my mind did at the monastery, zipping around for what it wanted, what it revealed about me was ridiculous.

I look at my life around me now and I see the true extent of my attachments and desire. Can I give up my iPod right now? Can I stop going to the library for my internet fix since the wireless is down at home? I’ve weaned myself off my physical addiction to caffeine, but can I stop making that benign cup of coffee in the morning, that comfort habit?

Can I let everything go and go to the monastery?

Any monastery, it doesn’t matter which one now, it doesn’t have to be perfect. I’m in Taiwan now. I don’t know what brought me here or if something brought me here, but as long as I’m here, maybe it’s a Taiwanese monastery that I should look into, even though I feel the state of Chinese Buddhism has become an institution and lost the spirit of practice, which has nothing to do with institutions.

The basic habit energy to be liberated from is the habit of believing we are substantially here at all. Human perception and experience is itself the path. I would like a poppy seed bagel with cream cheese, toasted, and cut in half. And a coffee with cream, no sugar. What were you doing in the Summer of 1991?