Life is intense
“I like to live, to live my life intensely. I am the type of person who loves his life passionately. Of course, someday, I will die, but I have the impression that when I die, I will die intensely as well. I will die experimenting with myself intensely. For this reason, I am going to die with an immense longing for life, since this is the way I have been living.”
Paulo Freire
Rereading this quote, my body comes to feel increasingly open, accepting the shivers, the conflicts, the exalted states, the uncertainty, the loneliness, and the frightening deep connections with those I could never call my own.
Fine, this is just another way of being in this world, of being this world, of inhabiting, incorporating, its intensity.
I never settled for ‘intensity’ to be solely a qualitative description of giftedness. Life is intense. I guess this, to me, was also a transformation of seeking intensity into opening up to the full spectrum of experience.
I remember sitting in the classroom. I was 6, 7, 9, or so. Sitting and sitting, noticing how the auditorial information sounded more like a scattered song or someone attempting but failing to get out of bed than something to organize my praxis around. Whenever a teacher was finished giving yet another example, I quickly looked at the other students to see what we were supposed to do.
Looking out of the window, it was my own attention which caught my attention.
Distracted according to one norm, fully engaged according to another. I just felt baffled by this strange life. How does this work, really? What is everybody experiencing, deep down? Who is she, he, who are we? Why is something important and something else apparently not? Could I ever stop questioning?
My emotionally intense inner landscape always drew me towards some kind of existential questioning and heightened sensuality stimulated me to create beauty and a renewed sense of unity out of the disintegrative, not so much shared questioning. I think all the artistic effort I can look back on and forward to, is rooted in my attempts to safeguard a longing for intensity. Echoing Freire, as if something inside of me wants to make sure that I will die deeply longing for life. In this longing, there is some resistance. Death will not bring about a diminishing of intensity. If anything, an intensification!
Rest assured; longing can be greedy. It takes more than a bit of Buddhist practice to let it flow through me instead of letting it overtake my awareness.
Longing can be melancholic, and it takes more than a bit of clear discernment to distinguish past pains from uncertainty filled present yearning.
Nonetheless, longing is what keeps me centered in aliveness. At times, and luckily, its objects are lost – or free from conditioned grasping - and all what is left is an intense surge of life’s energy. Throughout this body, degenerating towards the catharsis of that same longing. Floating in between past and present, grounded in a radically engaged emotionality. It is a praxis, actually. One that grew out of accumulating moments of profound distraction. Whatever is deemed boring may become this acute sense of longing.