On Life

I witness daily life and wonder...is this it?  How do we become more selfless and help others and drop this small mind's thoughts of I, me / my.  I see my parents and wonder about how their daily life is filled with repetition.  They seem happy and their main concern is health, but I feel as though there is more.  I have a dear friend around their age, a tad bit younger, and he's thoroughly miserable and alone.  Makes you wonder.  On the one hand there's a sense of daily ritual at some level of contentment and at another level there's this loneliness and isolation in misery.  In either circumstance, one dies alone, relatively speaking.  How do we create a full life of selfless service, harmony, and creating joy for others?  ...but the small mind says, "while maintaing some sense of self."  This small minded ego still yearns for relevance and identity.  How do we surrender this ego and dissolve in absolute nothing...how do five guys / sadhus live at a temple and cease to exist?  This paradox of dissolving seems very difficult, kind of like in that movie Peaceful Warrior, when the main actor, Dan Millman, let's go of himself when he's at the top of some monument.

How do we dissolve?  How do we let go?  How do simply be present? 

In all this world's strife, amidst the world's pandemic / epidemic, people are asked to shelter in place, people are sick and dying, and we still have police brutality and demonstrations, peaceful protests, and then violent riots.  How do we stop?  How do we, as a country, become still.  How do we become human beings.  Being is the most difficult thing.  Life seems easier when doing, but near impossible in being.

Seems like the happiest people, as they age, as seniors, seem to have developed life-long friendships and social circles, seem to live this life with belongingness and connectedness, with a sense of valuing relationships:  friends, life-partner(s), children, colleagues, family, community.  This belongingness seems a little contradictory to Sannyasi...makes you wonder.