ENDING AT THE BEGINNING

A Zen monk once described life as the interval between bathtubs, between the bathtub in which the baby is washed after birth and the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial. 

Samuel Beckett, the novelist and playwright, wrote in his play Waiting for Godot, "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." 

Both of these images convey, starkly, the reality of life, but are also misleading.  For instance, life may be short but it is not a straight line.  Rather is it a cycle, a circuit where the finish line is the starting line.

We begin life by doing things, and then by doing more and more things, until we reach the end, where we find life undoing everything we've done.  The egoic self, for example, diminishes in importance to us, until, at the finish, it is completely unimportant.  Next, our possessions we no longer value, and then everything we've learned. 

This shedding of the layers of life is a purging, a purification that occurs quite naturally as we prepare for the end, a conclusion that we do not fear, it turns out, because we have been there before.  We die in the same place where we were born.  It is form becoming formless once again, the manifested once more the unmanifested.  There is never nothing, just the cycle.