Harry L

MY LAST HOUR OF LIFE

This exercise of writing a plan for my last hour of life—not yours, or theirs, or the “last hour in the abstract”—but my own last hour in this body was both strangely easy and at the same time extremely challenging. Thinking about doing it was easy, planning for it, like organizing my thoughts before a trip or a presentation, but actually sitting still with this idea was like trying to put the wind in a bottle, with my bare hands. It was like getting ready to “not be me,” but this is hard to do since I can’t remember “never having been.” Can you? What was it like before you were born?

What would it be like to be attached to nothing, to be only Awareness?

I can better understand why E.J. and Gurdjieff recommended this exercise as perhaps the only way for post-industrial humans to wake up to who we are, and also why the author of Revelations was so fixated on the notion that “the last days are coming.” It so easy just to numb up and get lazy and find something else to distract me.

The preliminary effort of making each hour richer than the previous one –a way of sneaking up on the task–was worth making, and several things became clear immediately. First, everything became much more noticeable. Everything I looked at or heard or touched had more detail, was somehow more alive, every sensation in all my sensory input was magnified, made clearer, brighter, more melodious. At the same time, objects and the earth itself became both more and less solid, depending on something I cannot articulate. I made several runs at this, noticing and practicing noticing, then forgetting, then starting again when distractions faded. I decided that this would be essential to my last hour, so it became number one in my plan: change my tempo and notice everything around me and within me in exquisite detail, as deeply as I can. Of course, all of this is dependent on not being in such great pain that my essence habits can carry me through and I am able to focus on being present.

The second thing in my plan was to forgive; Other people, events, the universe, God, and myself for any grievance real or imagined that I still hold, for the simple reason that this holding on to the past or fearing the future restricts what I notice in the present.

Noticing and gratitude are woven together, so giving thanks for the entire experience of this life is my third suggestion to myself. Noticing naturally gives birth to being thankful, and gratitude is the attitude that keeps the door open.

Noticing, forgiving, and being grateful; this is pretty much it, as these are at the heart of Presence. Everything else that came to mind was nowhere near as expansive or edifying, and for the most part felt misguided or irrelevant. No “bucket list” item is gratifying if there is no one there, fully present in the experience, to give it value.