A process

Our body exchanges atoms with the environment with every breath, every touch, every meal. The proteins in our entire body are renewed at least once a year on average. Pretty much nothing in our body is the same as it was a year ago, safe perhaps the pattern, the shape. Our psyche has also changed. The experiences we have had and the ones we haven’t, which have also turned into an experience we have had even if only as an experienced want, have pushed our mind to evolve. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. We are not the same. I am not the same. I am a process. There never was an I.

Listening to meditation teachers, I have lately found myself deeply involved (embedded?) in this sense of process. And lately, in my work, I have come across this notion of processual biology that explains this same idea in a scientific way about the organisms, the organs, the cells and the whole environment.

I had goosebumps when I realise how my so-called spiritual life – for lack of a better word – had coalesced with my thoughts about my work, when apparently they had nothing in common. Except one thing, of course: me. Me, a process in itself that brought together or nucleated the deep certainty that everything is a process, that there is only impermanence. Everything evolves in a thermodynamic non-equilibrium that, in essence, is what life is.

For we, when we feel, evaporate: oh, we
breathe ourselves out and away: from ember to ember,
yielding us fainter fragrance. Then someone may say to us:
‘Yes, you are in my blood, the room, the Spring-time
is filling with you’….. What use is that: they cannot hold us,
we vanish inside and around them. And those who are beautiful,
oh, who holds them back? Appearance, endlessly, stands up,
in their face, and goes by. Like dew from the morning grass,
what is ours rises from us, like the heat
from a dish that is warmed. O smile: where? O upward gaze:
new, warm, vanishing wave of the heart – :oh, we are that.
Rilke, Second Elegy

At some point last week, I had this feeling that not only was I part of a process laterally, connected with the rest of the world, like it or not, but also longitudinally, connected with what happened before me and linking it to what will happen afterward. I felt as if I was in the middle of everything and at the same time everything passed through me, as if I were just a coordinate in spacetime, with no substance, just a point of coincidence of ongoing processes. A witness, maybe, in this precise and at the same time undefined point.

How can I not be part of a whole, both laterally and longitudinally? How can I define where I start and end? How can I ever say there is a me, where is the evidence? I am a continuous becoming, never to arrive at a destination. A wave in the ocean. The appearance of a wave.