I was wrong about the two previous posts not needing to have been writ. They were actually helpful. Sometimes you need to go some place to realize it's not a place you want to go. Oh. That's kinda the story of my life.

The conveyor belt/treadmill metaphor was useless, albeit accurate, but realizing that still requires formation of some other paradigm. New paradigm. Different paradigm. What was wasn't working.

Nothing should be comfortable about my existence, considering how it has to end. Well, how it has to end for all of us, but trying or pretending to choose to in my case. Itsa big difference. For people in general, we all have to die but that's no reason to not get comfortable about existence as much as we can. Let it come when it does. Don't go where you're not invited until you're invited.

For people like me with the realization of death as a focus, there is no getting comfortable with existence. Death is a reality that can't be put aside because putting it aside is ignoring the obvious, and existence is by nature uncomfortable because it's fleeting and needs to be explored and understood as such. Maybe that's what the great adepts were getting at. Maybe they were as bad at it as me. Probably not.

I'm thinking I have to tap into sadness and despair, not as emotions but as concepts, which is a bit ironic since Buddhism teaches to do away with concepts. In this case, the concept is a tool in furtherance of doing away with concepts. Which in many ways is exactly what many Buddhistic methods necessarily are.

Sadness and despair are useful in that those are the normative emotions, tools, concepts that ordinary people avoid or are given as reasons or explanations for suicide. But I'm not ordinary, I'm not necessarily suicidal, it's just what I want to do and will eventually have to do since that's the way I set my life up. Not being suicidal makes it hard to commit suicide. Tapping into sadness and despair just as concepts, and not as the things humans generally attach to as real and things to avoid, can help. 

There's a lot of blurring that goes on. All the beauty in the things I love and appreciate become sadness and despair because they are fleeting. They won't last no matter how much I want them to be loved. Dig deep and deeper into those emotions of love and appreciation and they become sadness and despair because they all come to pass. It's still love, and joy is still joy, laughter is still laughter, but they take on more dimensions, they become multi-faceted. Anger is no longer a feeling but an energy that's pretty useless and can be stopped when recognized as an energy. Lust is no longer some base animal impulse for desire and self-gratification, but a very powerful energy that is very useful if controlled. Despair and sadness don't mean depression. Everything starts getting transformed in practice.

I don't know when it will be time, I don't know how others knew it was time, but I've come to imagine it's a full-body realization. I've never had that before. I used to talk about being at 100% or getting to 100%. As a full-body realization, I doubt I've ever been near 100%. I won't project on what I think I was, I may have never even been 1%, I may have gotten to 80%, I just don't know myself that well.